CXF and standalone web services

Question

I'm currently writing a few applications that contain web service clients and servers, as complete standalone applications, eg without any web application server / servlet engine. I'm using plain Java 6, and for the "server" part I'm using the sun HttpServer. Working like a charm.

(actually I am using CXF, but only for their wsdl2java tool, which is more flexible than the one that ships with Java 6).

I've been wondering now if there is any benefit for me to look at frameworks like CXF. Strangely enough, I can't find any information on the CXF web site on such a scenario, they just seem to blindly assume that everybody uses an applications server (and worse, maven).

One of the reasons why I'm looking at CXF is that in the near future I expect that I need to support AIX as well, and there I can't use:

reqcontext.put(BindingProviderProperties.CONNECT_TIMEOUT, connect_timeout);
reqcontext.put(BindingProviderProperties.REQUEST_TIMEOUT, request_timeout);

CXF has this thing called an HTTPClientPolicy which would nicely fit the bill.

Does anybody have any links to articles discussing using CXF without any application server / servlet engine? Are there any other benefits that CXF could give me over the current Java 6 JAX-WS implementation?

Maarten

Answer 1

Almost all the samples that come in the CXF distribution are setup specifically as a "main method" type service that starts up the service and clients and such as standalone applications without any use of an app server (or even Tomcat). The CXF samples would be a good place to start.

That said, they do all use Maven now. :-)