“With Spring Web Services 1.0," said Rod Johnson (pictured), CEO of Interface21 and founder of the Spring Framework, "we have applied these same modular design concepts in order to deliver advanced integration and a more flexible, powerful programming model to developers working with sophisticated Web services.” Johnson was speaking as Interface21 today announced the release of its comprehensive Web services stack for developing and consuming SOAP and POX (Plain Old XML) Web services.

Spring Web Services 1.0, Johnson noted, facilitates the creation of contract-first, document-driven Web services, delivering the flexibility, productivity and ease of use benefits of the Spring Framework to the Web services environment.

"Spring Web Services 1.0 provides a more flexible, powerful Web services framework by facilitating best practices such as contract-first Web service development, the WS-I basic profile, and loose coupling between contract and implementation, allowing for the creation of flexible Web services using one of the many ways to manipulate XML payloads. By providing developers with a simpler approach to contract-first development, Spring Web Services 1.0 resolves many of the interoperability issues associated with typical Web services approaches," he said.

Additional features of Spring Web Services 1.0 include:

• Powerful Mappings - Incoming XML requests can be distributedd to any object, depending on message payload, SOAP Action header, or an XPath expression.
• XML API Support - Incoming XML messages can be handled in standard JAXP APIs such as DOM, SAX, and StAX, but also JDOM, dom4j, XOM, or even marshalling technologies.
• Flexible XML Marshalling - The Object/XML Mapping module in the Spring Web Services distribution supports JAXB 1 and 2, Castor, XMLBeans, JiBX, and XStream. Because it is a separate module, it can be used in non-Web services code as well.
• Reuse of Spring Framework Concepts - Uses Spring application contexts for all configurations. Additionally, the architecture of Spring Web Services resembles that of Spring MVC.
• WS-Security Support - Allows developers to sign SOAP messages, encrypt and decrypt them, or authenticate against them.
• Integration with Spring Security - The WS-Security implementation of Spring Web Services provides integration with Spring (Acegi) Security, enabling developers to use existing configuration for SOAP service as well.

Spring Web Services 1.0 is available for download. For more information, including software downloads, visit http://www.springframework.org/download.