Looking for lightweight java stack for creating SOAP based web services.

Question

I'm probably going to be using Tomcat and the Apache Axis webapp plugin, but I'm curious as to any other potential lightweight solutions.

The main goal of this is to connect to MySQL database for doing some demos.

Thanks, Todd

Answer 1

Check out XFire, which apparently has morphed into CXF.

They have a user guide to get you started.

Answer 2

Tomcat is a good choice. Its light weight as you mentioned and it is very well supported.

Answer 3

Jetty is a lightweight servlet container that you might want to look into.

Answer 4

Define lightweight? (What DOES that mean anyway nowadays??)

With JAX-WS/Metro you need to simply make a boiler plate change to the web.xml, and then annotate a POJO with @WebService, and, tada, instant web service.

The distribution has several jars in it (around a dozen I think, but they're all in the install -- you don't have to go crawling the web for them), however, but the implementation is top notch and the "simple" stuff simply works.

Edit: JAX-WS can be readily deployed in Tomcat and Jetty, and comes "for free" in Glassfish and Glassfish V3 Prelude.

Answer 5

I agree with Mads. If you're going to be running demos, then you should really consider adding Jetty and Maven to your stack. I run my production under Tomcat, but...

mvn jetty:run

...is incredibly convenient. Check out the Maven Jetty Plugin Configuration Guide.

Answer 6

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm looking at the Glassfish/Metro solution, in addition, talking to a couple guys around here suggested looking at GRAILS which supports XFire via plugins.

Updated: My actual solution seems pretty slick. I'm using Grails, with the Metro plugin. In about 5 minutes, I was able to get up and running with a demo WebService. Also, Grails in development uses Jetty. So thanks for all the suggestions again, and it seems I was able to incorporate all of them. Looking forward to digging into this Grails, JAX-WS (Metro), etc..