I’m developing a web application with multiple frameworks (spring, hibernate, spring-security, ZK for GUI), and using Tomcat as app server. I must say I have absolutely no experience with java web services technologies. Thing is, I will almost certainly have to expose number of services for some external applications in the near future, and I was wondering what would be the way to go (considering the frameworks I’m using)…
I saw and read various tutorials and some questions (link) regarding Axis, Axis2, JAX-WS… Thing that confuses me a little bit is that I don’t know what is the common practice (if any) to integrate services within existing web application (mainly in the terms of project organization). As I see it now, these services that I need to implement will rely partially on the existing source code, so I don’t know whether I should use completely separate project, or I can put it inside my existing web app folder (which I tried with Axis2, but don’t know if it’s a good practice).
Thanks.
How to organize the projects?
In general I agree with @ericacm, but there is one thing you should keep in mind… You said you’re going to develop a number of services in the near future. You may come to a point at which you want to host the services on a separate server, e.g. for performance, availability or maintainability reasons. This may influence your decision of separating the projects. Furthermore, separation “enforces” loose coupling, but therefore introduces other challenges like session sharing across multiple WARs. It’s a case-by-case decision.
If I were in your situation I’d first ask myself whether the service(s) logically belongs to the web application or not.
Implementation
When in comes to WS-* implementations you have to make 2 decisions: