Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring Web Services 1.0 Release Candidate 1 has been released. This is a first release candidate of Spring Web Services on the way to a generally available 1.0 release. 

Spring Web Services is a product of the Spring community focusing on creating interoperable, document-driven web services.

Spring Web Services key features

Since its first public release over a year ago, Spring Web Services offers a unique approach for successfully implementing document-driven web services. The product provides a distinct set of features focused on creating stable, interoperable web services whose contracts stand the test of time. These features include:

• Powerful mapping capabilities allowing you to route incoming messages to end-points for processing depending upon message payload, SOAP action header, or XPath expression.
• Tools allowing you to easily manipulate and query the XML payload of a message using one of the XML APIs that Spring Web Services supports.  Supported APIs include DOM, SAX, StAX, JDOM, and XOM.
• WS-Security support allowing you to sign SOAP messages, encrypt and decrypt them or authenticate against them. Integration with Spring Security (Acegi) is also provided. This means you can reuse your existing Spring Security configuration for securing your SOAP service as well.
• Read about more key feature at the Spring Web Services site.

You will find Spring Web Services makes use of well-known concepts and patterns found throughout the core Spring Framework.  This means you can reuse your existing Spring knowledge to start creating web services immediately.

Get involved in the Spring Web Services community

People use Spring Web Services for many reasons.  Many are drawn to it after finding that existing SOAP stacks fail to facilitate Web service development best practices. Spring-WS makes best practices such as Contract First the natural practice.

Spring Web Services is an emerging product of  the Spring Portfolio.  The team is aiming for a final 1.0 release in the coming months, and we'd love to hear your feedback to help ensure 1.0 is as solid as possible. Come join us at the Spring Web Services Forum.

Further reading

Several community leaders, including Spring Web Services project lead Arjen Poutsma, have written about Spring Web Services in the blogosphere:

• WS-DuckTyping - by Arjen Poutsma
• Tutorial - writing contract first web services - by Arjen Poutsma
• XPath support in Sprign Web Services - by Arjen Poutsma
• Interview on InfoQ about Spring Web Services
• Migrating Smoothly From rpc/encoded to document/literal web services with Spring WS - by Tareq Abed Rabbo
• Securing Spring WS clients with XWSS by Tareq Abed Rabbo
• An Echo web service with Spring WS by Mathew