Are there any technical Design-by-Contract solutions for Java projects similar to XINS? I’m looking for projects/frameworks that enforce developers to first author a contract for their application and then code within the boundaries of that contract, really using the contract to the full potential. I’m looking for something that, like XINS, generates code (server- and client-side, unit tests, stubs) and documentation (OpenDocument, HTML, test forms) from that contract, with a runtime component that validates the contract.
The contract can be anything, e.g. WSDL or a bunch of XML files. Integration with Spring would be nice to have.
Note that I developed XINS in the past (not the current maintainer anymore, though), and I’m wondering what similar solutions exist and how they compare.
As far as I understand Spring Web Services project promotes the approach you described. It’s even described in details in their tutorial. The idea is to describe data contract manually and create web services based on this description. Spring framework provides quite a lot of different infrastructure classes to make this task much easier to solve.