RSS 2.0A review of the Spring Web Services 2 Cookbook
The Cookbook fills a long-standing vacancy on the Spring bookshelf and plays a useful complementary role to the online Spring Web Services reference documentation. Considering the volume of publications, Spring WS is by far the poorer cousin of the Spring core, persistence, MVC, batch and integration lineup.
Over the last two years I've used Spring Web Services extensively in the implementation of a multi-operation web service facade to a foreign exchange dealing system in a large Australian bank.
I wish I'd had this book when I started the project. The WS examples from SpringSource are great, but they don't come close to demonstrating the richness of the platform's capabilities. The Cookbook's recipes and the accompanying sample projects cover just about every combination of transport and object-XML mapping that you're likely to use (SOAP over HTTP and JMS with JAXB2 and XMLBeans) and some of the more esoteric (SOAP over e-mail and XMPP with JiBX and MooseXML.)
Both XWSS and WSS4J for security are dealt with comprehensively. I was pleasantly surprised to find a chapter dealing with JAX-WS and Apache CXF as well as creating RESTful services, using Spring MVC. Testing using Spring's MockWebService as well as TCPMon and soapUI also get their own much needed chapter.
As you would expect of any cookbook, this one doesn't read easily cover to cover, and the recipes can appear repetitive at times. In-depth coverage has been sacrificed in favour of breadth. However, in my opinion, this is the Cookbook's strongest selling point. The wide range of subject matter allows the reader to easily explore the featured technologies and make educated evaluations and comparisons.
I find the Spring Web Services 2 Cookbook a worthwhile addition to my bookshelf. The book can bought from Packt Publishing and Amazon.com.
posted by James Gemmell on Tue, 15 May 2012 at 21:00 | permalink
