I'm so confused with WSDL

I’m confused, I’m screwed.

I’m confused because there seems so many things need to be done in order to generate a WSDL file. I need to create the POJO class; I need to create the XSD; I need to build the WSDL and link XSD together; I need to create publisher class to publish the web service. And then generate the JAX-WS JAVA artifacts… No, I don’t need that at the moment. Let’s see how I begin this mess.

With bottom up approach, one way to construct the JAX-WS Java artifacts is through the Endpoint class. Like what I did with the following code:

@WebService(serviceName="HelloWorldService", portName="HelloWorldPort", endpointInterface="org.huahsin.ws.HelloWorld")
public class HelloWorldEndpoint {
 public static void main(String args[]) {
  HelloWorld inst = new HelloWorld();
  Endpoint.publish("http://localhost:8080/wsAsync", inst);
  System.out.println("service published");
 }
}

Assuming I have the HelloWorld POJO declared in this way:

@WebService(serviceName="HelloWorldService")
public class HelloWorld {
 @WebMethod(operationName="hello")
 public String hello(@WebParam(name="name") String name) {
  return "Hello " + name;
 }
}

Executes the program, send the URL (http://localhost:8080/wsAsync?wsdl) to the web browser, then the WSDL content will be shown. After that save the WSDL content, by selecting all the text in the web page, and paste it into notepad, then save it as a file with WSDL file extension. Anyhow, this isn’t a good approach to generate the WSDL file.

Actually, there is a better approach for doing it with wsgen command. The usage is as shown below:

C:\project\ws>wsgen -verbose -wsdl -keep -cp target\classes org.huahsin.HelloWorld

Don’t confuse with –cp option, it is referring to the path where the compiled class of org.huahsin.HelloWorld is stored (I thought it was the JDK path). And the –wsdl option is to tell the wsgen command to generate a WSDL file. I feel much better with the tool now. Besides that, JBoss does have the similar utility, named wsprovide, and the usage is as follow:

C:\project\ws>wsprovide -w -k -c target\classes org.huahsin.HelloWorld

But make sure the \bin is registered in environment variable before it is usable.