Glen, (Typing this on a plane. Not sure when I'll be connected to send this to you, but.....)
Much of this is a bit historical. (jeeesh... I'm giving a historical excuse on a project that has only had releases for 5 months.) If you go back to the 2.0 release, things really didn't work very well if you DIDN'T use the cxf-servlet thing. With the cxf-servlet stuff, a Bus is created first (from the cxf.xml) and then the servlet would replace the transport, and then refresh with the cxf-servlet to create the endpoints. If you tried it without the two phase init stuff, the endpoints would either get a "wrong" bus or a partially initialized bus or similar. Lots of stuff was just broken. With 2.0.2 and 2.0.3, I went through a BUNCH of the spring initialization things to clean that up. Thus, it should now work either way. Using the normal spring applicationContext thing and explicitely importing just the cxf modules that you need certainly is the lightest weight approach. Doing that, you can get it pared down quite a bit (to just soap/http) which can help with startup time. However, it's very easy to miss things that could cause functionality issues. For example, in 2.0.3 we have added a META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-jaxws.xml that defines the object used to inject the WebServiceContext into spring beans which helps get around some of the Spring AOP issues. The cxf-servlet way, because we initialize a the Bus with ALL the cxf-extension-* things, that makes sure ALL the features are available. It definitely is slower, but is may be more "reliable". (And for what it's worth, we run the TCK using the cxf-servlet mode.) I hope that helps explain the histor Dan On Thursday 15 November 2007, Glen Mazza wrote: > Hello, > > I'm getting confused over the server-side configuration files for CXF. > When deploying a web service in a WAR file, what is the difference > between the cxf.xml config file and the cxf-servlet.xml config file? > I know the former needs to be on the classpath, and the latter is kept > directly under the WEB-INF folder--but what is the difference in those > two files' contents or purpose? > > Or, is there really no cxf.xml for the service, that cxf.xml is only > to be packaged with the client? I.e., can everything that is > specified in the cxf.xml actually be specifiable in the cxf-servlet > instead, eliminating the need for both files? > > Thanks, > Glen -- J. Daniel Kulp Principal Engineer IONA P: 781-902-8727 C: 508-380-7194 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.dankulp.com/blog
