how to deploy a jax-ws service to eclipse or tomcat?

Question

As a web services beginner, I have tried for 2 weeks to get a hello world webservice working with maven, eclipse and tomcat.

I gave up trying to get any of the code/wsdl generators to work, and I followed this tutorial http://myarch.com/create-jax-ws-service-in-5-minutes to hand code an example, which is brilliant.

This results in 4 class files and a WSDL file.

So my stupid question is how to "run" the service in eclipse and/or on tomcat?

I tried just deploying them as a webapp, but no joy - there is nothing in the web.xml to tell the servlet engine that the web service exists, so I guess it could never work.

Do I have to have a special web service container (e.g. axis2, metro or CXF) inside tomcat, and deploy to that? Or can it just run with some jax-ws jars + mystery configuration?

I dont want to have to install into tomcat metro (which uses ant, and is desiged for glassfish), or axis2 (which uses ant, and most people seem to not recommend).

I looked at CXF, but cant find anywhere on their site on how to install/configure it on tomcat (or eclipse) without spring. I put the CFX jars in maven dependencies, and installed the eclipse plugin, but this deoesnt get you any closer to actually running a webservice with out the mystery configuration glue. CXF seems tied to spring, which is a big minus for us as we dont use spring (or need any of its features).

I noticed helios wtp has some kind of web service project called JSR-109. Is this java RPC only, or does it support the full SOAP websiervice system, and is it worth trying to figrue out?

Any advice very welcome. I must have googled 1000 pages in search of the web serive holy grail - i.e. how to create and deploy one to tomcat end to end. Is it supposed to be this hard?

Answer 1

Add this fragment to your web.xml file

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>wshello</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>
        com.sun.xml.ws.transport.http.servlet.WSServlet
    </servlet-class>              
</servlet>      
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>wshello</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/webservice</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

And then just create a file whose name is sun-jaxws.xml.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<endpoints xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jax-ws/ri/runtime"  version="2.0">
  <endpoint  name="WebServiceTest"
             implementation="your.webservice.impl.ClassName"
             url-pattern="/webservice"/>
</endpoints>

Then create a war file as usual. You don't need CXF or Axis to deploy a basic WebService into Tomcat. By the way jax-ws library jars( jaxws-api.jar, jaxb-impl.jar etc..) should be in your classpath. You can download jax-ws libraries from here