Implement, deploy and call an EJB 3.0 webservice using Glassfish and JAX-WS

Playing around with EJB3.0 for a while, I decided to try the special webservice annotations set of EJB3.0 for deploying an EJB as a webservice.Looking at the documentation, I discovered that that this feature is based on the new Java XML webservice API called JAX-WS (JSR-224), which is in real JAX-RPC 2.0. I decided to build a EJB3.0 with special webservice methods in JDeveloper and deploy it on the Glassfish application server. Next, I developed a client for the webservice in Netbeans 5.0 using JAX-WS. I could have used JDeveloper for building the client, but I used Netbeans 5.0 for just trying a different IDE then the one I’m daily using .

I chose JDeveloper 10.1.3 for developing the EJB3.0 webservice, because it has, as one of the few IDEs , build-in support for EJB3.0 development. The code below shows the stateless session bean with a single webservice method that returns a message.

@Stateless
@WebService(serviceName = "MyFirstEJB3Service")
public class WebserviceEJBBean implements WebserviceEJB {
    public WebserviceEJBBean() {
    }
    
    @WebMethod(operationName="HelloWorld")
    public String getHelloMessage(String s)  {
        return "Hello " + s + "/n" +"This is my first EJB3.0 webservice developed in JDeveloper and deployed on the glassfish platform";
       }    
}

After you have generated a jar file for your EJB module, you login into the 
administration console of your Glassfish installation and deploy the jar file as 
an EJB module in the console (Applications -> EJB modules). 
After successfully deployed the module, you can test your webservice in the 
console (Webservices -> WebserviceEJBBean )
Ok, now we have implemented and deployed an EJB3.0 webservice on the 
Glassfish application server. It’s now time to make a client that consumes the 
webservice. Start your Netbeans 5.0 installation and make a new basic 
application project. Now you have to download the JAX-WS API binaries to you 
local drive and add them a s a library to your project. Now we have to generate 
artifacts to make the actual webservice call. JAX-WS contains a tool, called 
wsimport, to generate artifacts from a given WSDL file. You can 
integrate this tool as an ANT-task in your build file by inserting the following 
code in your project build file:
<!-- Overrides -pre-compile target 
         java artifacts that will created and compiled to build/classes directory. -->
    <target name="-pre-compile">
        <mkdir dir="build/classes"/>
        <taskdef name="wsimport" classname="com.sun.tools.ws.ant.WsImport">
            <classpath path="${javac.classpath}"/>
        </taskdef>

        <echo>running wsimport</echo>
        <wsimport
            debug="true"
            keep="true"
            destdir="build/classes"
            package="wsimport.generated.myfirstejbws"
            wsdl="http://localhost:8080/MyFirstEJB3Service/WebserviceEJBBean?WSDL"/>
    </target>
Finally, add the following code to the main method of the application’s main 
class and run the application to see the message returned by the webservice.
    


     

      
/**
     * @param args the command line arguments
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Response from the webservice: "+"/n"+Main.testService());
    }
    
    public static String testService(){
        //Use the generared artifacts to make the webservice invocation.
        MyFirstEJB3Service service = new MyFirstEJB3Service();
        WebserviceEJBBean proxy = service.getWebserviceEJBBeanPort();
        
        return proxy.helloWorld("Tom Hofte");
    }

     

    
I think with JAX-WS developing webservices and building clients for them
becomes really easy by using annotation and the supplied tools like
wsimport. Sun has done a great job with this new standard XML
webservice API!