Creating and Invoking a Web service using GlassFish in NetBeans, IntelliJ, and Eclipse - Part 3

In this third and last part of a blog series (part 1 and part 2), I plan to explore the steps to develop/deploy/invoke a Web service on GlassFish using Eclipse IDE.

Eclipse does not offer GlassFish as a a bundled container. Instead you need to install GlassFish plugin for Eclipse explicitly. The plugin requires WTP 1.0 installed in Eclipse so I did that following the instructions. After installing WTP, I configured GlassFish v2 M4 following rest of the plugin install instructions.

Here are the steps I followed to successfully build and deploy a Web service:

1. Create a new "Dynamic Web Project" with name "hello" as shown here. Note the target runtime is "GlassFish V2 Java EE 5". Click Next.
2. Uncheck "Sun DD Files" in "Project Facets" window as shown here. Click "Next" and "Finish" buttons.
3. In "Projects" pane, expand the "WebContent", "WEB-INF", and open "web.xml" as shown here.
4. GlassFish has a Deployment Descriptor Web service deployment but Eclipse seems to require "web.xml" for a WAR. So replace the contents of "web.xml" with a simplistic fragment shown below:
   
   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
       xmlns:j2ee="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" version="2.5"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
                       http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd">
</web-app>
5. In "Projects" pane, right click on "Java Resources" and create a new package as shown here.
6. Right-click on the newly created package and add a new class "Hello" as shown here.
7. Add the @javax.jws.WebService annotation and a method as shown below:
   @javax.jws.WebService
public class Hello {
  public String sayHello(String name) {
    return "Hello " + name;
  }
}
8. Select "Project" menu, "Build All" (default shortcut Ctrl+B).
9. In "Projects" pane, right-click on the project, select "Run As", "Run on Server". Take the defaults (GlassFish V2 Java EE 5) as shown here. Click "Next" and "Finish" buttons.
10. The endpoint gets deployed as shown here. This can be verified by clicking on the "Servers" tab, and expanding GlassFish node as shown here. The endpoint is hosted at http://localhost:8080/hello/HelloService?wsdl.

So far we have been able to deploy JAX-WS based Web service on GlassFish. Eclipse allows generating a Web service client using Axis run-time environment only. So as with IntelliJ, if you want to invoke a Web service using JAX-WS, the recommended way is to use NetBeans 5.5.1 to invoke the Web service.

Enjoy Web services deployed on GlassFish in Eclipse! And remember, GlassFish v2 uses Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT) that gives you interoperable Web services with Microsoft .NET 3.0 framework.

So if you want first-class Web services support in an industry-grade, cross-platform IDE and deploy it on an open source, production-quality, Java EE5-compatible Application Server, NetBeans IDE is the only choice.

_{Technorati: NetBeans IntelliJ Eclipse GlassFish Web service WSIT}