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Spring Web Services Example

Available as of Camel 2.6

This example shows how to expose a SOAP-based web service using Camel and Spring Web Services.

Running the example

The example is included in the distribution at examples/camel-example-spring-ws. To start the example use Maven:

mvn clean install jetty:run

This will expose a web service on http://localhost:8080/increment. With help of a tool such as Soap-UI it's easy to sent messages to this endpoint. There's a ready to use SOAP-UI project available at examples/camel-example-spring-ws/client.

Code walk through

The Camel route that exposes the above web service is defined as:

JaxbDataFormat jaxb = new JaxbDataFormat(false);
jaxb.setContextPath("org.apache.camel.example.server.model");

from("spring-ws:rootqname:{http://camel.apache.org/example/increment}incrementRequest?endpointMapping=#endpointMapping")
.unmarshal(jaxb)
.process(new IncrementProcessor())
.marshal(jaxb);

Taking a closer look at the URI reveals that this route consumes messages with a certain rootqname. In this case it listens for messages with root element incrementRequest defined in the http://camel.apache.org/example/increment namespace. These XML messages are unmarshalled to Java objects using Camel's Data Format support. After processing the resulting object is marshalled back to XML and returned to the client.

Further notice that the URI contains a reference to an endpointMapping in the Registry. Since we're using Spring the registry is a Spring ApplicationContext defined in spring-ws-servlet.xml. This file contains the following bean:

<bean id="endpointMapping" class="org.apache.camel.component.spring.ws.bean.CamelEndpointMapping">
	<property name="interceptors">
		<list>
			<ref local="validatingInterceptor" />
			<ref local="loggingInterceptor" />
		</list>
	</property>
</bean>

This bean is a Spring-WS endpoint mapping that maps incoming messages to appropriate Camel routes. You'll only need to define one CamelEndpointMapping regardless of the number of Camel routes that use Spring-WS endpoints.

The above endpointMapping bean is automatically picked up by the MessageDispatcherServlet declared in web.xml:

<servlet>
	<servlet-name>spring-ws</servlet-name>
	<servlet-class>org.springframework.ws.transport.http.MessageDispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>

Since the servlet is named spring-ws it will look for the file /WEB-INF/spring-ws-servlet.xml containing the earlier mentioned endpointMapping bean.