Building JAX-WS application with Maven

I was having issues building a JAX-WS application using Maven(NOTE: I'm using maven 2.0.11), when I generated my JAX-WS code using JAX-WS 2.2.  I saw errors like this:

cannot find symbol
symbol  : method required()
location: @interface javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlElementRef

or

cannot find symbol
symbol  : constructor Service(java.net.URL,javax.xml.namespace.QName,javax.xml.ws.WebServiceFeature[])
location: class javax.xml.ws.Service

This blog really helped me find my solution.

I'll summarize briefly what the issue was.

Java comes with several specifications APIs packaged into it, like JAX-WS & JAXB. However, the version of these specifications are not always the latest.   That is, newer versions of JAX-WS and JAXB may be released, but are not in the version of Java you may be using to compile with.  Even if the newer version is available on your server runtime, they may not be available in your JDK.  And even if you try to explicitly try to add the newer versions of the JAX-WS and JAXB jars to your maven dependency section, it still will not work.

In order to override the built in versions of the JAX-WS and JAXB, you have to utilize the "endorsed" folder.   Follow this link to learn more about the "endorsed" folder.

In short, adding newer versions of the jars to an endorsed folder in your JDK allow them to override any embedded versions.

So, the big question then is how to do this with maven.  Here's the answer..

You use the maven-dependency-plugin to create the "endorsed" folder and copy the newer version of the jars into it.  Then you update the maven-compiler-plugin to refer to this endorsed folder.

Here's a sample POM.


<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.3.2</version>
<configuration>
<source>1.6</source>
<target>1.6</target>
<compilerArguments>
<endorseddirs>${project.build.directory}/endorsed</endorseddirs>
</compilerArguments>
</configuration>
</plugin>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.1</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<phase>validate</phase>
<goals>
<goal>copy</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}/endorsed</outputDirectory>
<silent>true</silent>
<artifactItems>
<artifactItem>
<groupId>javax.xml.bind</groupId>
<artifactId>jaxb-api</artifactId>
<version>2.2</version>
<type>jar</type>
</artifactItem>
<artifactItem>
<groupId>javax.xml.ws</groupId>
<artifactId>jaxws-api</artifactId>
<version>2.2</version>
<type>jar</type>
</artifactItem>
</artifactItems>
</configuration>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>


With these settings we were able to successfully build our JAX-WS 2.2 code with Maven.

Hope this helps!