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At work, we currently have a WSDL interface as well as a semi-RESTful interface that we're looking to expand upon and take it to the next level.

The main application runs using Servlets + JSPs as well as Spring.

The idea is that the REST and WSDL are interfaces for an API that will be designed. These (and potentially other things in future) are simply a method through which clients will be able to integrate with the interface.

I'm wondering if there are any suggestions or recommendations on frameworks / methodologies, etc for implementing that under-lying API or does it make sense simply to create some Spring beans which is called either by WSDL or REST?

Hope that makes sense.

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Have a look at Eunicate it is great . You are using spring , Spring has had support of SOAP for a while and Spring 3 has support of REST (Creating and Consuming).

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Your approach makes sense. Probably the most important advice is to make the external API layer as thin as possible. You can use Axis, Apache CXF, Jersey, etc. to handle the implementation of the REST or SOAP protocols, but the implementation of those services should just load the passed in data into a common request object, and pass that into a separate service that handles the request and returns a response object which the external API layer will marshall into the correct format for you.

This approach works especially well when you have a competitor providing similar services and you want to make it easy for their customers to switch. You just build a new external API that mirrors the competitors, and simply translates their format to your internal api model and provided your services are functionally equivalent, you're done.

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This is a really late response, but I have a different view on this topic. The traditional way as we know it is to unmarshall xml to java and marshall java to xml. However if the wsdl changes then it would effectively be a structural change in the code which would again require a deployment.

Instead of the above approach if we list the fields mentioned in the wsdl in a presistent store, load the mappings in memory and prepare our structures based on these mappings we would have to have many less changes for this..Thus IMO instead of using existing libraries a configurable approach to unmarshalling and marshalling should be taken.

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