Contract-first web services?

Question

I'm interested in learning more about contract-first web services, including how to put them together.

1. Can anyone recommend useful resources that explain the needed aspects/components and how to produce them?

2. Can anyone recommend frameworks in addition to or as an alternative to Spring's contract first web services?

Thanks.

Answer 1

In answwer to 2. Another alternative is CXF. I have a tutorial here for devloping a CXF webservice contract first with maven.

Answer 2

I use axis2 for contract first WS development. This guide is pretty close to how I do it.

1. build a WSDL and schema
2. Run WSDL2Java
3. Build an implementation of the generated skeleton interface

I've also used spring-ws, which I found to be about the same amount of work.

Answer 3

A framework that is dedicated to contract first web services is Spring Web Services . I recommend it because of the easiness of integrating web services with large scale applications with the support of the Spring framework.