Can I use Spring MVC and Spring WS in one single application?

Question

Basically there is a back-end application that is exposing both SOAP as well as RESTful services.

I have decided to use Spring WS 1.5.8 for SOAP services, and
Spring MVC 3.0 for RESTful services as this is a new feature.

upon reading a bit about Spring WS (I am new to this!) we got to declare a "MessageDispatcherServlet" which is a front controller, in web.xml for Spring WS.

For Spring MVC we should declare a "DispatcherServlet" which is also a front controller, in web.xml.

for both servlets we have different servlet declarations in web.xml.

i.e. for Spring WS I have

  <servlet>
  <servlet-name>springsoap</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>org.springframework.ws.transport.http.MessageDispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
  <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
  </servlet>

  <servlet-mapping>
  <servlet-name>springsoap</servlet-name>
  <url-pattern>/soapservices/*</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>

for Spring MVC (RESTful) i have

<servlet>
<servlet-name>springmvc</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>

    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>springmvc</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/restservices/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

Therefore i should use 2 config files ?? one named springmvc-servlet.xml and another springsoap-servlet.xml ?

Can this be done ?

Answer 1

Yes, this is fine. You put the MVC-related stuff into one, and the WS stuff into another.

If they need to share services, then it's best to declare a shared context using ContextLoaderListener in web.xml, which defines a third context which should contain the shared beans (see docs for example of how to set this up).

It's also worth nothing that MessageDispatcherServlet is just a convenient assembly of a standard DispatcherServlet plus a few other components. You can just declare those components yourself and use a DispatcherServlet, but that gets quite fiddly.