Deploy JAX-WS Web Services On Tomcat

Here’s a guide to show you how to deploy JAX-WS web services on Tomcat servlet container. See following summary steps of a web service deployment.

1. Create a web service (of course).
2. Create a sun-jaxws.xml, defines web service implementation class.
3. Create a standard web.xml, defines WSServletContextListener, WSServlet and structure of a web project.
4. Build tool to generate WAR file.
5. Copy JAX-WS dependencies to “${Tomcat}/lib” folder.
6. Copy WAR to “${Tomcat}/webapp” folder.
7. Start It.

Directory structure of this example, so that you know where to put your files.

1. WebServices

A simple JAX-WS hello world example.

File : HelloWorld.java

package com.mkyong.ws; import javax.jws.WebMethod;import javax.jws.WebService;import javax.jws.soap.SOAPBinding;import javax.jws.soap.SOAPBinding.Style; //Service Endpoint Interface@WebService@SOAPBinding(style = Style.RPC)public interface HelloWorld{ @WebMethod String getHelloWorldAsString(); }

File : HelloWorldImpl.java

package com.mkyong.ws; import javax.jws.WebService; //Service Implementation Bean @WebService(endpointInterface = "com.mkyong.ws.HelloWorld")public class HelloWorldImpl implements HelloWorld{ @Overridepublic String getHelloWorldAsString() {return "Hello World JAX-WS";}}

Later, you will deploy this hello world web service on Tomcat.

2. sun-jaxws.xml

Create a web service deployment descriptor, which is also known as JAX-WS RI deployment descriptor – sun-jaxws.xml.

File : sun-jaxws.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><endpoints  xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jax-ws/ri/runtime"  version="2.0">  <endpoint      name="HelloWorld"      implementation="com.mkyong.ws.HelloWorldImpl"      url-pattern="/hello"/></endpoints>

When user access /hello/ URL path, it will fire the declared web service, which is HelloWorldImpl.java.

Note
For detail endpoint attributes , see this article.

3. web.xml

Create a standard web.xml deployment descriptor for the deployment. Defines WSServletContextListener as listener class, WSServlet as your hello servlet.

File : web.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN""http://java.sun.com/j2ee/dtds/web-app_2_3.dtd"> <web-app>    <listener>        <listener-class>                com.sun.xml.ws.transport.http.servlet.WSServletContextListener        </listener-class>    </listener>    <servlet>        <servlet-name>hello</servlet-name>        <servlet-class>        com.sun.xml.ws.transport.http.servlet.WSServlet        </servlet-class>        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>    </servlet>    <servlet-mapping>        <servlet-name>hello</servlet-name>        <url-pattern>/hello</url-pattern>    </servlet-mapping>    <session-config>        <session-timeout>120</session-timeout>    </session-config></web-app>

4. WAR Content

Use Ant, Maven or JAR command to build a WAR file to include everything inside. The WAR content should look like this :

WEB-INF/classes/com/mkyong/ws/HelloWorld.classWEB-INF/classes/com/mkyong/ws/HelloWorldImpl.classWEB-INF/web.xmlWEB-INF/sun-jaxws.xml

Note
For those who are interested, here’s the Ant file to build this project and generate the WAR file.

File : build.xml

<project name="HelloWorldWS" default="dist" basedir=".">    <description>        Web Services build file    </description>  <!-- set global properties for this build -->  <property name="src" location="src"/>  <property name="build" location="build"/>  <property name="dist"  location="dist"/>  <property name="webcontent"  location="WebContent"/>   <target name="init">        <!-- Create the time stamp -->        <tstamp/>        <!-- Create the build directory structure used by compile -->        <mkdir dir="${build}"/>  </target>   <target name="compile" depends="init"  description="compile the source " >        <!-- Compile the java code from ${src} into ${build} -->        <javac srcdir="${src}" destdir="${build}"/>  </target>   <target name="war" depends="compile"  description="generate the distribution war" > <!-- Create the war distribution directory -->  <mkdir dir="${dist}/war"/>   <!-- Follow standard WAR structure -->  <copydir dest="${dist}/war/build/WEB-INF/" src="${webcontent}/WEB-INF/" />  <copydir dest="${dist}/war/build/WEB-INF/classes/" src="${build}" /> <jar jarfile="${dist}/war/HelloWorld-${DSTAMP}.war" basedir="${dist}/war/build/"/>  </target> </project>

5. JAX-WS Dependencies

By default, Tomcat does not comes with any JAX-WS dependencies, So, you have to include it manually.

1. Go here http://jax-ws.java.net/.
2. Download JAX-WS RI distribution.
3. Unzip it and copy following JAX-WS dependencies to Tomcat library folder “{$TOMCAT}/lib“.

• jaxb-impl.jar
• jaxws-api.jar
• jaxws-rt.jar
• gmbal-api-only.jar
• management-api.jar
• stax-ex.jar
• saaj-impl.jar
• streambuffer.jar
• policy.jar

6. Deployment

Copy the generated WAR file to {$TOMCAT}/webapps/ folder and start the Tomcat server.

For testing, you can access this URL : http://localhost:8080/HelloWorld/hello, if you see following page, it means web services are deploy successfully.

Download Source Code

Download It – JAX-WS-Deploy-To-Tomcat-Example.zip (13KB)

Reference

1. JAX-WS WAR File Packaging
2. Deploying Metro endpoint
3. Publishing a RESTful Web Service with JAX-WS