Using spring-ws with already existing WSDL

Question

I am new to spring-ws. what ever tutorial i see starts with xsd and at the end generates a wsdl. What is the approach when we have already an existing wsdl.

Also i was having a doubt on contract first approach which is already discussed (though am not getting convinced with the answer)

spring-ws and contract-first approach

My assignment is to use spring-ws with an existing wsdl. can you please provide me an approach for this.

As per my understanding. In the process of contract first approach, I got the contract already so how to proceed further is not shown in any tutorial.

Answer 1

When developing a web service using Java you can use one of two approaches:

• Contract-first: start with an WSDL that defines the web service operations and their input/output messages. Then generate the corresponding Java objects to implement the service.
• Contract last: Start with the implementation of one or more methods in Java and generate the WSDL files based on these methods and the Java objects that they use.

Spring-WS, as you already mentioned, only supports the contract first approach. This means that you cannot develop a web service using Spring-WS without first having a WSDL or XSD that describes the input/output messages.

You should be able to create a service using Spring-WS using any valid WSDL file. For a concrete example let me point you to a blog post that I created that illustrates how you can develop a web service using Spring-WS starting from a WSDL file.