XFire for Grails Applications - the pre-plugin Era

I've updated my Grails from 0.3.1 to 0.4 snapshot and its new coming plug-in architecture looks very promising. I'm hoping that someone will implement an XFire plugin for Grails soon (mentioned some where in Grails' wiki). Anyway, I'm going to talk about how to integrate XFire into an Grails application manually.

Here, I briefly show you steps to integrate annotation-based XFire Web services into your Grails Applications.

1. download XFire distro (I'm using 1.2.3).
2. put everything (.jar files) of XFire into ${YOUR_GRAILS_APP}\lib
3. create your Web service class in src/java
4. modify resources.xml
5. modify web.template.xml
6. grails run-app

It's still configuration-based approach, not conventional yet.
Anyway, this might be useful to someone, who currently need to use XFire, when the XFire plugin still be an imaginary thing.

Note that, this covers only HTTP-based transportation of XFire, since Grails is mainly for Web.

Let's go into details:
Before starting, you have to put all XFire .jar files into your /lib folder first.

So, you can start by put your annotation-based classes in "src/java" folder.

@WebService
public class MyService {

@WebMethod
public String doSomething() {
return "hello";
}

@WebMethod(exclude=true)
public void hideMePlease() {
return;
}

}

what you needs are modification of "resources.xml" for spring, and "web.template.xml".

OK, then add some XML chunks into your spring/resources.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC "-//SPRING//DTD BEAN//EN"
"http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans.dtd">

<beans>

<!-- You need this line to import "xfire" and
"xfire.transportManager" references in -->
<import resource="classpath:org/codehaus/xfire/spring/xfire.xml" />

<!-- Your service goes here -->
<bean name="myService" class="org.codehaus.xfire.spring.ServiceBean">
<property name="xfire" ref="xfire"/>
<property name="serviceBean" ref="myService"/>
<property name="serviceClass" value="MyService"/>
<property name="serviceFactory" ref="jsr181"/>
</bean>

<!-- Here's initialising an "jsr181" instance to be
a factory object for your services -->
<bean id="jsr181"
class="org.codehaus.xfire.spring.config.ServiceFactoryBean"
init-method="initialize">
<constructor-arg index="0" value="jsr181" />
<property name="transportManager" ref="xfire.transportManager" />
</bean>

</beans>

Finally, put some servlet configuration into your "web.template.xml", like this

<servlet>
<servlet-name>XFireServlet</servlet-name>
<display-name>XFire Servlet</display-name>
<servlet-class>
org.codehaus.xfire.spring.XFireSpringServlet
</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>XFireServlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/servlet/XFireServlet/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>XFireServlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/services/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

OK, let's type "grails run-app" and browse to "http://localhost:8080/${your_grails_app}/services/myService/" to see its WSDL link.
And that's all, your XFire service is now ready.