JAX-WS Web service on Tomcat without sun-jaxws.xml

Question

I am trying to minimize required configuration while deploying JAX-WS-based Web service on Tomcat. With the introduction of Servlet 3.0 (supported by Tomcat 7+), web.xml

Answer 1

Sadly, the configuration must exist somewhere. That is mandatory, per the source. Believe it or not, the location of the sun-jaxws.xml file is hard-coded to /WEB-INF/sun-jaxws.xml (thanks, guys @ Metro).

Effectively, you need to take control of the following classes

• public final class WSServletContextListener

• public class WSServlet

---

What needs to happen:

1. WSServletContextListener will obviously not be extended. This listener performs most of the initializations per the sun-jaxws.xml and jaxws-catalog file. Like I mentioned earlier, the location is hard coded. So your path of least resistance here is to

   • implement your own vanilla servlet listener (with @WebListener) and call a new WSServletContextListener(). You'll then delegate your own contextInitialized(ServletContext ctxt) and contextDestroyed() methods to the ones in your instance of WSServletContextListener.

   • Generate the file on instantiation of the listener, on the fly, using an @XmlRootElement class that'll represent the sun-jaxws file(I'll provide a sample of this in a short while, don't have the time right now :) ).

It's a lot of trouble for such a dispensable convenience, IMO, but it should work in theory. I'll write some samples and see how they play shortly.