The Server

You can develop your web service using a groovy script and/or a groovy class. The following two groovy files are valid for building a web-service.

1. MathService.groovy
   
   
   
2. You can also using something more Groovy
   
   
   
3. Then the easy part ... no need for comments
   
   
   That's all !

The Client

1. Oh ... you want to test it ... two more lines.
2. You're done!

The Server

The PersonService.groovy script contains the service implementation and the custom data type (Person).

Server.groovy is equivalent to the previous example.

For each class compiled by the groovy compiler a metaClass property is added to the bytecode. This property must be excluded from being mapped by XFire, otherwise an error will be reported when trying to obtain the WSDL document from http://localhost:6980/PersonServiceInterface?wsdl. The reason is that XFire cannot map groovy.lang.MetaClass. To ignore the metaClass property a custom type mapping must be defined (for details refer to Aegis Binding).

However, if you compile custom data types from Java the bytecode won't contain a metaClass property and, hence, there is no need to define a custom mapping.

The Client

Current limitations (and workaround)

1. No authentication (see JIRA issue 1457)
2. No proxy support (see JIRA issue 1458)
3. Numeric values are represented as strings in custom data types and arrays.
4. Custom data types cannot be processed on client side when using the Groovy SOAP module with the current groovy-1.0 release.
5. It looks like the XFire dynamic client does not support complex datatypes. This may be a concern if you need for example to transfer an Image as a byte array. The workaround I use is to transform this in a String an transfer that String - As this is a bit painful I am investigating moving to the regular XFire client. Here is a little program demo-ing this (look at this "disco age" image - Is Groovy that old ?

The client (ImageClient.groovy)

The (ugly) server part embedding the image which is Base64 encoded (ImageServer.groovy):

and the missing and secred part is here.

Demos with public web services

There exist a lot of web-services available for testing. One which is pretty easy to evaluate is the currency rate calculator from webservicex.net.

Here is a small swing sample that demonstrate the use of the service. Enjoy !

And here is the result: