Last Wednesday at J-Fall, the bi-annual meeting of the NL-JUG in Ede, the Netherlands, Arjen Poutsma announced the Spring Web Services project.

With features such as pluggable Object-XML mappers, a unified exception hierarchy for those mappers and options to do both contract-first and contract-last development, Spring Web Services will address some of the issues we and people we talk to on a daily basis have encountered while using existing solutions.

One of the key aspects of Spring Web Services is that it's going to be a framework, rather than a container. There's no need for yet another container, Spring IoC already provides us with all we need. Another important focus will be to integrate with existing solutions and implementations of standards. This means we won't be implementing specification for which an implementation already exist.

The slide of Arjen's presentation are available online. These contain a more detailed list of features that will be included in the 1.0 release, scheduled for Q2 2006.

More on the motivation for Spring Web Services can be found on Arjen's blog at blog.interface21.com/arjen.