GroovyWS terrifies me!

Later this week I was writing one Web Service and I wanted to test it very quickly. My first thought was: Apache CXF. Then I thought, maybe Groovy had some killer WS support.

I wasn't mistaken.

Groovy has GroovyWS module which terrifies me... in an extremely positive way!

Want to see why?

Prerequisites

Eclipse 3.4 with Maven2 and Groovy plugins.

Setting up the project

Create a simple Maven2 project, as an archetype select:

groupdId: org.apache.cxf.archetype
artifactid: cxf-jaxws-javafirst

In my case, under src/main/java, Maven2 created org.xh.studies.ws.cxfandgroovy package with a simple HelloWorld Web Service.

I modified it a little bit (added sayHiToPerson() method):

@WebService
public interface HelloWorld {
String sayHi(String text);
Greetings sayHiToPerson(Person person);
}

@WebService(endpointInterface = "org.xh.studies.ws.cxfandgroovy.HelloWorld")
public class HelloWorldImpl implements HelloWorld {
public String sayHi(String text) {
return "Hello " + text;
}
public Greetings sayHiToPerson(Person person) {
Greetings greetings = new Greetings();
greetings.setText("Hello " + person.getFirstName());
return greetings;
}
}

public class Person {
private String firstName;
private String lastName;
/* getter and setters */
}

public class Greetings {
private String text;
/* getter and setters */
}

Then I built and deployed my project.

Creating Groovy JUnit test

First, I added following dependencies to my pom.xml file:

<dependency>
<groupId>junit</groupId>
<artifactId>junit</artifactId>
<version>4.5</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.codehaus.groovy.modules</groupId>
<artifactId>groovyws</artifactId>
<version>0.5.0</version>
<scope>test</scope>
<exclusions>
<exclusion>
<artifactId>abdera-extensions-main</artifactId>
<groupId>org.apache.abdera</groupId>
</exclusion>
<exclusion>
<artifactId>abdera-i18n</artifactId>
<groupId>org.apache.abdera</groupId>
</exclusion>
</exclusions>
</dependency>

(Maven2 complained about not being able to download abdera-extensions-main and abdera-i18n so I added two exclusions for them)

Then, I added Groovy nature to my project.

Finally, I created src/test/groovy folder and org.xh.studies.ws.cxfandgroovy.HelloWorldTest Groovy class.

I've already investigated GroovyWS so I already knew that it used Apache CXF underneath, that is why I automatically added Apache CXF logging interceptors.

Stub of my test looked like that:

public class HelloWorldTest {
def proxy
@Before
public void setUp() {
proxy = new WSClient('http://localhost:6080/cxf-and-groovy/HelloWorld?wsdl', this.class.classLoader)
// magical method
proxy.initialize()
// Apache CXF logging interceptors
proxy.client.getInInterceptors().add(new LoggingInInterceptor())
proxy.client.getOutInterceptors().add(new LoggingOutInterceptor())
}
}

First test: sayHi()

Using GroovyWS you just use the proxy object as if it was an instance of a Web Service, if you want to invoke a method called sayHi() you just do it (and Groovy takes care of the rest):

@Test
public void testSayHi() {
def result = proxy.sayHi('Lukasz')
def expected = 'Hello Lukasz'
assertEquals expected, result
println 'testSayHi ==> ' + result
}

I thought it was nice, but would it handle complex types?

Second test: sayHiToPerson()

Yes, of course it would! My test sayHiToPerson() invocation looked like this:

@Test
public void testSayHiToPerson() {
def person = new Person()
person.setFirstName('Lukasz')
def result = proxy.sayHiToPerson(person)
def expected = 'Hello Lukasz'
assertEquals expected, result.text
println 'testSayHiToPerson ==> ' + result.text
}

Summary

It's terrifying, it really is... I think that from now on I will be testing my Web Services using only GroovyWS!

Take care,
Łukasz