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.

Create a web service (of course).
Create a sun-jaxws.xml, defines web service implementation class.
Create a standard web.xml, defines WSServletContextListener, WSServlet and structure of a web project.
Build tool to generate WAR file.
Copy JAX-WS dependencies to “${Tomcat}/lib” folder.
Copy WAR to “${Tomcat}/webapp” folder.
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{
 
	@Override
	public 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.class
WEB-INF/classes/com/mkyong/ws/HelloWorldImpl.class
WEB-INF/web.xml
WEB-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
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.