Deployment Descriptor-free Web services in GlassFish

One of the big benefits of JAX-WS 2.0 is that deployment descriptors are optional. By optional, it means no deployment descriptors are required if you can live with the reasonable defaults defined by the JAX-WS specification. So if you develop a trivial Web service, starting from POJO (Plain Old Java Object), as:

@javax.jws.WebService(targetNamespace="http://example.org")
public class Hello {
  public String sayHello(String name) {
    return "Hello " + name;
  }
}

compile it and drop the class in $AS_HOME/domains/domain/autodeploy directory, where AS_HOME is the directory location for GlassFish, then you have deployed a Web service at http://localhost:8080/Hello/HelloService?wsdl. With GlassFish v2 M4, the WSDL looks like (default values are highlighted in bold):

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<definitions 
  xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/"
  xmlns:tns="http://example.org"
  xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
  xmlns="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/"
  targetNamespace="http://example.org"
  name="HelloService">
  <types>
    <xsd:schema>
      <xsd:import namespace="foobar" schemaLocation="http://localhost:8080/Hello/HelloService?xsd=1">
      </xsd:import>
    </xsd:schema>
  </types>
  <message name="sayHello">
    <part name="parameters" element="tns:sayHello">
    </part>
  </message>
  <message name="sayHelloResponse">
    <part name="parameters" element="tns:sayHelloResponse">
    </part>
  </message>
  <portType name="Hello">
    <operation name="sayHello">
      <input message="tns:sayHello">
      </input>
      <output message="tns:sayHelloResponse">
      </output>
    </operation>
  </portType>
  <binding name="HelloPortBinding" type="tns:Hello">
    <soap:binding transport="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http" style="document">
    </soap:binding>
    <operation name="sayHello">
      <soap:operation soapAction="">
      </soap:operation>
      <input>
        <soap:body use="literal">
        </soap:body>
      </input>
      <output>
        <soap:body use="literal">
        </soap:body>
      </output>
    </operation>
  </binding>
  <service name="HelloService">
    <port name="HelloPort" binding="tns:HelloPortBinding">
      <soap:address location="http://localhost:8080/Hello/HelloService">
      </soap:address>
    </port>
  </service>
</definitions>

The wsdl:service/@name, wsdl:port/@name, wsdl:portType/@name and other similar elements use a default value, defined by the JAX-WS specification, derived from the class name and method name. All these values can be easily configured using @WebService and @WebMethod.

This class is in default package and that's why @WebService/targetNamespace attribute is required. Otherwise targetNamespace is derived from the package name and in which case the Web service implementation looks like:

package hello;

public class Hello 
  public String sayHello(String name) {
    return "Hello " + name;
  }
}

There is a similar sample in GlassFish samples as well. A much broader collection of JAX-WS samples is available here.

This Deployment Descriptor-free concept also work if you really like to bundle up your classes together in a WAR. Basically just package your classes in WEB-INF/classes directory and that's it. No web.xml, sun-web.xml or any proprietary descriptors are required.

As shown above, converting your POJO to a Web service is really simple, does not require any deployment descriptors, improves readability of code and is backed by the production-quality JAX-WS runtime in GlassFish.

And if you are using NetBeans, then you don't need to worry about any of these details.

_{Technorati: Web service GlassFish JAX-WS JAXWS Samples Ease of Use}