How to create documented WSDL using XFire

Question

Hi there,

I use XFire to create a webservice wrapper around my application. XFire provides the webservice interface and WSDL at runtime (or creates them at compile time, don't know exactly).

Many of our customers don't know webservices very well and additionally they simply don't read any external documentation like Javadoc. I know that it's possible to add documentation (for parameters and methods) directly to the WSDL file.

I thought about Annotations or Aegis XML files but I don't know how... Do you know a way?

Edit: I just found this JIRA issue but the last activity was 2006. Any ideas?

Answer 1

XFire is slowly headed for /dev/null. Use CXF instead. In other words, XFire is being deprecated in favor of CXF - it's pretty much the same developers.

Since you use the Java-first approach, I suggest you generate you WSDL once and for all with CXF's java2wsdl tool, then you put your documentation in that and tell CXF to use that documented WSDL instead of letting CXF generate its own (undocumented) WSDL at runtime/deploy-time.

This page has pretty much everything you need to know about creating a web service in CXF.

Answer 2

Let's me add my two cents regarding XFire. We had very serious issue with XFie under JDK6 (both Tomcat 6.0 and 5.5).Please take a glance at that issue. In our case XFire with 4+ web services under JDK6 leads to hanging application servers (thread deadlocks etc.). It's interesting, but under JDK5 everything was OK.

And I completely agree with Christian Vest regarding migration to CXF from XFire. It has sense in many cases e.g. ESB Mule 2 doesn't support native XFire connectors anymore (see also).

And I wish to add that migration from XFire to CXF is not straitforward way (e.g. CXF has jar dependences that conflict with some hibernate releases see also), but it's doable. In our case we did it for couple days without code correction (Spring only configuration).

And my last hint regarding CXF - use Aegis for data binding instead of JAXB. It doesn't work for complex POJO.

Answer 3

And my last hint regarding CXF - use Aegis for data binding instead of JAXB. It doesn't work for complex POJO.

In my experience we have no problem with complex POJO and JAXB, the only problem is that the code starts to be cluttered with JAXBElements. On the other hand, Aegis documentation is pretty sparse and not well-maintained with relation to CXF.