Today I'm going to show you how to create a web service client from WSDL. You'll be suprised how quick and easy it is to get this done using a few common tools.... and we're only going to write 5 lines of code!
You will need;
- Eclipse
- Maven 2
Step 1
Create a new maven project in eclipse. Skip archetype selection to create a simple project. We're going to use Apache CXF, a popular open source web service framework. CXF gives us a wsdl2java code generation plugin to do all the programming for us. Once we've added the plugin to our POM, it looks like this;
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>qwerky.blog</groupId>
<artifactId>webservice</artifactId>
<version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
<name>Programming without programming #1</name>
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.cxf</groupId>
<artifactId>cxf-codegen-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.3.2</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>generate-sources</id>
<phase>generate-sources</phase>
<configuration>
<sourceRoot>src/generated/java/</sourceRoot>
<wsdlOptions>
<wsdlOption>
<wsdl>src/main/resources/wsdl/stockquote.wsdl</wsdl>
</wsdlOption>
</wsdlOptions>
</configuration>
<goals>
<goal>wsdl2java</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>
</project>
Step 2
The webservice we're going to call is a public stock quote service provided by WebserviceX.net. Download the WSDL from http://www.webservicex.net/stockquote.asmx?WSDL and put it in /src/main/resources/wsdl/stockquote.wsdl in your workspace.
Step 3
Run maven generate-sources and notice that some classes have been generated in the package net.webservicex, don't forget to add src/generated/java to your project's build path.
Step 4
Finally we have to do a bit of programming ourselves. Here come our 5 lines! Use the eclipse new class wizard to create a new class, ticking the box to create a main method. Inside the class's main method we're going to create an instance of the generated soap class, give it an endpoint and get a stock quote.
String endpoint = "http://www.webservicex.net/stockquote.asmx";
URL wsdlUrl = StockCheck.class.getClassLoader().getResource("wsdl/stockquote.wsdl");
StockQuoteSoap soapRequest = new StockQuote(wsdlUrl).getStockQuoteSoap();
((BindingProvider)soapRequest).getRequestContext().put(BindingProvider.ENDPOINT_ADDRESS_PROPERTY, endpoint);
System.out.println(soapRequest.getQuote("GOOG"));
Finally, run your class and have a look at the output. Hopefully you should see some response XML with details of Google's current stocks. Check out the screenshot of my workspace.
