Building Clients with the CXF API

In the previous posts we saw how to run a CXF application and test the web services using a JAX-WS client. While our previous client was built using classes from the JAX-WS API, there are other ways to execute the code too.
Consider the below client:

public static void main(String[] args) throws MalformedURLException {

 final String endpointAddress = "http://localhost:8080/WithSpring/services/echo";
 JaxWsProxyFactoryBean factory = new JaxWsProxyFactoryBean();
   
 factory.setServiceClass(IEcho.class); //the service SEI
 factory.setAddress(endpointAddress);
 IEcho client = (IEcho) factory.create();

 String reply = client.echoHi("Dude");
 System.out.println("Server said: " + reply);
}

The below shorter code will produce the same response. It uses a org.apache.cxf.jaxws.JaxWsProxyFactoryBean to create the client stub. This is a CXF class.
From the source code:

Factory for creating JAX-WS proxies, This class provides access to the internal 
properties used to set-up proxies. Using it provides more control  than the 
standard JAX-WS APIs.

If we are using Spring on the client, then the JaxWsProxyFactoryBean can be configured as a bean. In fact the stub can also be set up as a bean:

public static void main(String[] args) throws MalformedURLException {

 ClassPathXmlApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(
   "client-beans.xml");
 IEcho client = (IEcho) context.getBean("client");
 System.out.println(client.echoHi("Joe"));
}

The details are all in the spring configuration file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
 xmlns:jaxws="http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws"
 xsi:schemaLocation="
  http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans 
                http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
  http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws http://cxf.apache.org/schema/jaxws.xsd">

 <bean id="client" class="com.code.first.ws.server.IEcho"
  factory-bean="clientFactory" factory-method="create" />

 <bean id="clientFactory" class="org.apache.cxf.jaxws.JaxWsProxyFactoryBean">
  <property name="serviceClass" value="com.code.first.ws.server.IEcho" />
  <property name="address"
   value="http://localhost:8080/WithSpring/services/echo" />
 </bean>

</beans>

We configured the JaxWsProxyFactoryBean  and then created a client bean specifying the factory instance method to be used to instantiate it.
This configuration can be further simplified:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:jaxws="http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans 
  http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd 
  http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws http://cxf.apache.org/schemas/jaxws.xsd">
 <jaxws:client id="client" serviceClass="com.code.first.ws.server.IEcho"
  address="http://localhost:8080/WithSpring/services/echo" />
</beans>

In this case we used the client element from the http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws namespace. The element is a shortcut technique for the earlier style. It also creates a bean which we used in our main method.