Web services here we come! Last Wednesday, Arjen Poutsma announced Spring Web Services at our bi-annual NL-JUG meeting in Ede. We’ve been carefully planning this effort and believe it’s going to help developers that need to create web services on top of their Java-based business tier a lot. A SOAP-based web service is not yet another RPC-style invocation mechanism and with the following key aspects of Spring WS, we’ll try to address this.

• Facilitating changing business requirements and service interfaces through creating a tiny MVC-like layer with
• support for pluggable Object-XML mappers like Castor, JAXB(2) and XMLBeans while still
• allowing both contract-first and contract-last development and
• reusing existing platform services and (WS-*) standards and implementations such as reliable messaging and security solutions

The good thing (and Arjen did a good job at explaining this) about Spring Web Services in my opinion is that it’s going to be more like a web services framework, rather than a web services container. Spring is already providing the lightweight container, so why create yet another container? Web services should be just another way to expose your services, nothing more nothing less.

More information on the web services effort will be posted shortly on www.springframework.org. First milestones are planned for early december, while the 1.0 release is scheduled to take place in Q2 2006.

We already got a lot of positive comments on the new initiative and interestingly enough, over the last two weeks, we got a couple of inquiries of people that didn’t know about Spring Web Service asking what we were planning to do in this area.