9.4. Wiring it all together

We’re finally down to the final stage of developing a Spring-WS service. We need to configure the Spring application context with our endpoint bean and a handful of infrastructure beans required by Spring-WS.

Spring-WS is based on Spring MVC (which we’ll see more of in chapter 13). In Spring MVC, all requests are handled by DispatcherServlet, a special servlet that dispatches requests to controller classes that process the requests. Similarly, Spring-WS can be fronted by MessageDispatcherServlet, a subclass of DispatcherServlet that knows how to dispatch SOAP requests to Spring-WS endpoints.^[2]

^[2] The “web” in web services seems to imply that all web services are served over HTTP. But that’s not necessarily true. Spring-WS has support for JMS, email, and raw TCP/IP-based web services. Nevertheless, since most web services are, in fact, served over HTTP, that’s the configuration I’ll talk about here.