Programmatically obtain a Servlet instance for a JAX-WS WebService implementation?

Question

I'm working on a web service using the top-down approach, generating service types and interfaces from a WSDL using JAX-WS' wsimport. This provides a port type interface as follows, which I implement.

/**
 * This class was generated by the JAX-WS RI.
 * JAX-WS RI 2.2.4-b01
 * Generated source version: 2.2
 */
@WebService(name = "ExamplePortType", targetNamespace = "http://example.com")
public interface ExamplePortType {

    /**
     * @param example
     * @return java.lang.String
     * @throws ExampleException
     */
    @WebMethod
    @WebResult(name = "exampleResponse", targetNamespace = "http://example.com")
    @RequestWrapper(localName = "sendExample", targetNamespace = "http://example.com", className = "com.example.SendExample")
    @ResponseWrapper(localName = "sendExampleResponse", targetNamespace = "http://example.com", className = "com.example.SendExampleResponse")
    public String sendExample(
        @WebParam(name = "example", targetNamespace = "http://example.com")
        ExampleRequest example)
        throws ExampleException
    ;
}

It seems like the normal way to add this service to your application server (in my case, Tomcat), is to add the implementation class to the web.xml as a servlet and add WSServletContextListener as a listener. Very roughly, it seems that on initialization of the context, the listener constructs ServletAdapters which wrap the implementation bean and add them to a WSServletDelegate which is called by a thin WSServlet. Requests to your implementation are then handled by the WSServlet and passed to your bean by the delegate based on whatever URL patterns you have set up.

Is there a way to do the above programmatically? I want a method which accepts an instance of the above interface and returns to me an instance of a Servlet, which, if registered in a ServletContext, would route the appropriate requests to the wrapped implementation. Something like:

Servlet exampleServlet = new ServletAdapter().wrap(new ExamplePortTypeImpl());

One requirement is that I cannot rely on static configuration files (such as web.xml or sun-jaxws.xml). Does JAX-WS or a related library (ie: Axis2, etc.) provide this kind of functionality?

Apologies if something is not clear; it's my first time here :). Any pointers are appreciated.

Currently Using JAX-WS 2.1, Tomcat 7, Servlet 3.0.

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 14 '21 at 16:10

Based on Anthop's answer, this is the code I came up with that works for me.

// Main code:

final ServletContextHandler soapContextHandler = createSoapServletContextHandler();

final HandlerList handlers = new HandlerList();
handlers.setHandlers(new Handler[] { soapContextHandler });

server = createServer(port);
server.setHandler(handlers);
server.start();

// Function:
    private ServletContextHandler createSoapServletContextHandler()
    {
        final ServletContextHandler soapContextHandler =
                new ServletContextHandler(ServletContextHandler.SESSIONS);

        WSEndpoint<SoapServiceImpl> endpoint =
                WSEndpoint.create(SoapServiceImpl.class, false, null, null, null, null,
                        BindingImpl.getDefaultBinding(), null, null, null, false);

        ServletAdapter servletAdapter = new ServletAdapterList().createAdapter("soap", "/soap", endpoint);

        SoapServlet soapServlet = new SoapServlet(
                new WSServletDelegate(Collections.singletonList(servletAdapter), new EmptyServletContext()));

        soapContextHandler.addServlet(new ServletHolder(soapServlet), "/soap");
        return soapContextHandler;
    }

// Servlet:
    private static class SoapServlet extends HttpServlet
    {
        private final WSServletDelegate delegate;

        SoapServlet(WSServletDelegate delegate)
        {
            this.delegate = delegate;
        }

        @Override
        protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) throws ServletException, IOException
        {
            delegate.doGet(req, resp, getServletContext());
        }

        @Override
        protected void doPost(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) throws ServletException, IOException
        {
            delegate.doPost(req, resp, getServletContext());
        }
    }

Where SoapServiceImpl is your soap service implementation, and EmptyServletContext is just a completely empty implementation of ServletContext that just returns null or defaults for all the methods.

This should serve soap requests on path /soap using Jetty. You can add other context handlers to the list and they will also work alongside the soap handler. I have tested it alongside a Jersey context handler, so my service handles both REST and SOAP requests on the same port with Jetty.

Anthop · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-19T22:46:32.597

Okay, after a lot of experimenting, I've been able to put together something that works. I'll post it here for the sake of documentation.

Basically, I got to this by emulating or re-implementing how JAX-WS creates it's WSServlet from it's WSServletContextListener. Unfortunately, I was not able to find an easier or better support and straightforward way of doing this.

Basically, my factory creates a WSEndpoint using it's WSEndpoint.create() method. create() takes as input the Class of the WebService implementation which I'm trying to wrap. Most of the other inputs are null to encourage WSEndpoint to use a default or try to pull some configuration off of annotations in the implementation class.

I then use a new ServletAdapterList() to create a ServletAdapter using the previously created WSEndpoint. For this, since I'm creating one Servlet per implementation class, the name of the adapter doesn't matter, and it can be configured to send all traffic to the implementation regardless of the URL.

Then, I create a single new WSServletDelegate() using a singleton list of the prior ServletAdapter. The only trick here is that it seems that JAX-WS has, at least for this and the next step, a bad habit of storing some values in the init params of the ServletContext. It also doesn't null check properly, even though it has defaults to use if the parameters are not in the context. So I also ended up creating a dummy implementation of the ServletContext which I pass into the WSServletDelegate constructor to make it feel like it's looking up init params.

Lastly, I created an implementation of HttpServlet that forwards requests to the WSServletDelegate similar to how WSServlet does. Since WSServlet again stores the delegate object in the ServletContext init params, I found it easier to just re-implement its functionality than mess around with the existing WSServlet. This implementation of an HttpServlet can then be treated like any normal Servlet that will accept and handle SOAP webservice calls.

Programmatically obtain a Servlet instance for a JAX-WS WebService implementation?

2 Answers2