Is Spring Web Services good enough?

[Rajkumar balakrishnan]

Hi friends,

I am going to use Web Services in my project. We are going to develop the project using Spring and hibernate as persistence layer. My question is either i go with the Springs own Web Services or others like XFire, Axis2. I have read many articles and everything ends up with their choice. I need more performance as the number of users will be high. Currently i am in dilemma for choosing between web services, because once i chose it, it'll be fixed. So please help me with that

[Ulf Dittmer]

Currently i am in dilemma for choosing between web services, because once i chose it, it'll be fixed.

You should be able to avoid lock-in by sticking to standard APIs like JAX-RS, SAAJ and JAX-WS. Those are supported by various implementations and you should be able to swap implementations without too much effort if need be.

I need more performance as the number of users will be high.

If you keep your code generic enough that you can swap implementations, then you can perform load testing against different server WS stacks and see if they satisfy the performance requirements.

[Rajkumar balakrishnan]

Ulf Dittmer wrote:
You should be able to avoid lock-in by sticking to standard APIs like JAX-RS, SAAJ and JAX-WS. Those are supported by various implementations and you should be able to swap implementations without too much effort if need be.

I didn't get your point Ulf. What do you mean by lock-in???

Ulf Dittmer wrote:
If you keep your code generic enough that you can swap implementations, then you can perform load testing against different server WS stacks and see if they satisfy the performance requirements.

Ofcourse, i do load test it, but i need to make the decision now. No looking back.

[Ulf Dittmer]

Lock-in is the situation you described: you pick one product or technology and can't change to something else later: vendor lock-in Using standards (like JAX-WS and JAX-RS) helps to avoid this because the cost of switching is comparatively low.

[David Newton]

Perhaps you could read those articles and form your *own* opinion, rather than relying on somebody else to tell you what to think.

If your application has properly separated its concerns, the worst possible scenario is that you have to change the way your functionality is exposed as a web service. Tedious, but hardly a major issue in the grand scheme of things.

[Rajkumar balakrishnan]

^^

After digging out regarding this i find Axis 2 bit more interested than SWS. But a simple question is , i need a XML parser to form XML(to send to the API as input) and parse the resultant XML(get from API). So which one you would suggest

[Ulf Dittmer]

The general approach would not be to generate the XML/SOAP yourself, but to use the SOAP stack's tools (called "wsdl2java" in Axis' case) to generate Java code to access the web service. Creating SOAP manually is tedious and error-prone to develop, and hard to maintain. It also becomes downright prohibitively complex if you want to use further Axis capabilities like WS-Security.

[Rajkumar balakrishnan]

^^ So its better to stick with axis and a XML Parser. Right?

[Ulf Dittmer]

What do you mean by "stick" with Axis? Are you considering developing a SOAP service without using a SOAP stack? If so, please give up on that right now.

I think you missed the point of my previous post - you should not be using a parser to handle the SOAP, but instead use the Java code generated by the tools that are part of whichever SOAP stack you end up using.

[Rajkumar balakrishnan]

^^
Its a REST based service. XML is used for server/client communication.

[Ulf Dittmer]

Its a REST based service.

That's the kind of crucial information that you should have mentioned in your first post. Be sure to check out the JAX-RS API for the server-side implementation, and the various JAX-RS implementations (like Jersey) for what they offer to develop the client side.

[Rajkumar balakrishnan]

This what they mentioned in the document :

"A conceptual understanding of Web Services as well as strong familiarity with REST architecture and HTTP protocol is necessary"

[David Newton]

So?

[Rajkumar balakrishnan]

David Newton wrote:So?

So what technology do i need to use? Whether i need XML parsers or the technology help me build/parse XMLs?

[Ulf Dittmer]

So what technology do i need to use? Whether i need XML parsers or the technology help me build/parse XMLs?

Didn't every single one of my posts address exactly those issues?

[Mark Spritzler]

In Spring 3.0 they have RESTful Web Services, and it is extremely simple. And you can use things like CFX, but it is JAX-RS.

Mark

[Rajkumar balakrishnan]

@Ulf

I didn't mean it that way. I just explain Mark why i put that sentence. I already started looking at JAX-RS API. Thanks Ulf.