CXF provides you with many options to build clients for your services. This guide is meant to give you a quick overview of those options and help you orient yourself quickly with CXF.

Building Clients

WSDL2Java generated Client

One of the most common scenarios is that where you have a service which you may or not manage and this service has a WSDL. In this case you'll often want to generate a client from the WSDL. This provides you with a strongly typed interface by which to interact with the service. Once you've generated a client, typical usage of it will look like so:

HelloService service = new HelloService();
Hello client = service.getHelloHttpPort();

String result = client.sayHi("Joe");

The WSDL2Java tool will generate a JAX-WS clients from your WSDL. You can run it one of three ways:

• The command line
• The Maven Plugin
• With the WSDL2Java API

For more in depth information read Developing a JAX-WS consumer or see the Hello World demos inside the distribution.

JAX-WS Dispatch APIs

JAX-WS provides "dispatch" mechanism which makes it easy to dynamically invoke services which you have not generated a client for. Using the Dispatch mechanism you can create messages (which can be JAXB objects, Source objects, or a SAAJMessage) and dispatch them to the server. A simple example might look like this:

URL wsdlURL = new URL("http://localhost/hello?wsdl");
Service s = Service.create(new QName("HelloService"), wsdlURL);
Dispatch<Source> disp = service.createDispatch(new QName("HelloPort"), Source.class, Service.Mode.PAYLOAD);

Source request = new StreamSource("<hello/>")
Source response = disp.invoke(request);

NOTE: you can also use dispatches without a WSDL.

For more in depth information see the Hello World demos inside the distribution.

JAX-WS Proxy

Simple Frontend Client

Dynamic Client