Web service client with JAX-WS in Eclipse

In this blogpost, I will use JAX-WS to show how easy it is to create a simple client that makes use of the web service we created in the previous blogpost. The client can be implemented in various ways, like a web application or an EJB. In both mentioned ways, you run the client in a Java container. Therefore, you can take advantage of the resource injection facility provided by the container. This means you can use annotations to automatically inject the web service object where needed. We start out by creating a standard client, which does not run in a container.

Let's get started by creating a standard Java project in Eclipse. When done, start up a command prompt and navigate it to the root directory of the newly created project. Use the wsimport command to generate the classes you need to access the web service. You need the URL of the WSDL for this to work. The following command generates the sources and classes, and place them in the default Eclipse directories.

wsimport -s src
         -d bin
         http://localhost:8080/webservice/ExampleWSService?wsdl

Now, create a new class, which acts as the client. An example client:

package com.javaeenotes;

import javax.xml.ws.WebServiceRef;


public class WebserviceClient {

    // This annotation only has effect in a container.
    @WebServiceRef(
        wsdlLocation =
        "http://127.0.0.1:8080/webservice/ExampleWSService?wsdl"
    )
    private static ExampleWSService service;

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        WebserviceClient wsc = new WebserviceClient();
        wsc.start();
    }

    public void start() {
        // This statement is not needed when run in container.
        service = new ExampleWSService();
        ExampleWS port = service.getExampleWSPort();
        System.out.println(port.greet("Peter"));
        System.out.println(port.multiply(3, 4));
    }
}

The resource injection annotation is not necessary here, because the client does not run in a container. I left it here to show how to use annotation to inject the resource into your class when run in a container.