Lets take a simple example of a web service endpoint exposing a functionality to query a book price, given the ISBN number, given a maven project. This write-up just concentrates on establishing a web service unit testing framework. Following are sequence of steps one could follow to achieve the required infrastructure setup.

1) Change ${basedir}/pom.xml include adding spring-test dependency, and TestNG dependency, with maven-surefire-plugin configuration (assuming CXF dependencies are already present)

<dependency>
 <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
 <artifactId>spring-test</artifactId>
 <version>2.5.6</version>
 </dependency>
<dependency>
 <groupId>org.testng</groupId>
 <artifactId>testng</artifactId>
 <version>5.9</version>
 <classfier>jdk15</classifier>
 <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

2) Add a Spring configuration file (service-test.xml) under ${basedir}/src/test/resources. The CXF’s JaxWSProxyFactoryBean can be wired to to create a service proxy. Below is the snippet of the configuration file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:cxf="http://cxf.apache.org/core"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd
                    http://cxf.apache.org/core http://cxf.apache.org/schemas/core.xsd"></span></pre>
    <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf.xml" />
     <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-soap.xml" />
     <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-http.xml" />

     <!-- Required to load the service endpoint uris -->
     <bean id="propConfig" class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
         <property name="locations">
            <list>
               <value>classpath:service-test.properties</value>
             </list>
         </property>
     </bean>

     <bean id="proxyFactory" class="org.apache.cxf.jaxws.JaxWsProxyFactoryBean">
         <property name="serviceClass" value="com.schtech.service.endpoint.store.BookPriceService"/>
         <property name="address" value="${bookstore.service.endpoint.url}"/>
         <property name="bus" ref="cxf" />
    </bean>

     <bean id="serviceClient" class="com.schtech.service.endpoint.store.BookPriceService" factory-bean="proxyFactory"
        factory-method="create"/>
</beans>

3) Implement the TestNG test case to test web service. Here three things have to be noted: (1) ContextConfiguration annotation helps us load
the configuration file. (2) The test case extends AbstractTestNGSpringContextTests to load the context configuration and autowire the service
bean. (3) Autowire annotation on the service endpoint interface initializes with proxy factory created service proxy instance.

@ContextConfiguration(locations = {"classpath:service-context.xml"})
public class BookCatalogTest extends AbstractTestNGSpringContextTests
 { @Autowired
   private BookPriceService serviceClient;

   @Test
   public void testBookPrice()
   { String isbn = "978-3-16-148410-0,";
     Double price  = serviceClient.findBookPrice(isbn);
     assertNotNull(price);
   }
}

The infrastructure is ready to be used to test other service endpoints hosted elsewhere. Running mvn test at the ${basedir} prompt would unit test the service endpoints.

1) Web application configuration (/WEB-INF/web.xml) snippet (as specified below) loads Apache CXF configuration (classpath:cxf.xml) and delegates to CXF container

<context-param>
 <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
 <param-value>classpath:cxf.xml</param-value>
 </context-param>

 <servlet>
 <servlet-name>CXFServlet</servlet-name>
 <servlet-class>org.apache.cxf.transport.servlet.CXFServlet</servlet-class>
 <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
 </servlet>

 <servlet-mapping>
 <servlet-name>CXFServlet</servlet-name>
 <url-pattern>/service/*</url-pattern>
 </servlet-mapping>

2) Apache CXF’s configuration (cxf.xml) loads the Spring context configuration

 <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf.xml" />
 <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-soap.xml" />
 <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-servlet.xml" />
 <import resource="classpath:jcrcontext.xml"/>

where the SpringModules JCRContext configuration loads the JackRabbit’s RepositoryFactoryBean

<bean id="repository" class="org.springmodules.jcr.jackrabbit.RepositoryFactoryBean">
  <property name="configuration" value="classpath:repository.xml"/>
  <property name="homeDir" ref="./target/myrepository"/>
 </bean>

 <bean id="sessionFactory"  class="org.springmodules.jcr.jackrabbit.JackrabbitSessionFactory">
  <property name="repository" ref="repository" />
  <property name="credentials" ref="simpleCredentials"/>
 </bean>

 <bean id="jcrTemplate" class="org.springmodules.jcr.JcrTemplate">
  <property name="sessionFactory" ref="sessionFactory" />
  <property name="allowCreate" value="true" />
 </bean>

 <bean id="simpleCredentials" class="javax.jcr.SimpleCredentials">
  <constructor-arg index="0" value="bogus"/>
  <constructor-arg index="1">
   <bean factory-bean="password" factory-method="toCharArray"/>
  </constructor-arg>
 </bean>

 <bean id="password"  class="java.lang.String">
  <constructor-arg index="0" value="pass"/>
 </bean>

This chaining can be extended to any depth and a myriad range of implementation stacks could be acheived, if a container (Spring, Seam, Guice) offer support for seamless intra-container configuration and component resolution.

This quick tip addresses how to put in place a unit testing infrastructure, so that unit testing Apache CXF web-services becomes a easy task. We assume we would use TestNG flavor of Unitils for our understanding, using JUnit is equivalently similar, and Maven based POM.

1) Include the Unitils dependency with TestNG in ${basedir}/pom.xml as given below.

<dependency>
 <groupId>org.unitils</groupId>
 <artifactId>unitils</artifactId>
 <version>2.3</version>
 </dependency>

 <dependency>
 <groupId>org.testng</groupId>
 <artifactId>testng</artifactId>
 <version>5.8</version>
 <classifier>jdk15</classifier>
 <scope>test</scope>
 </dependency>

2) Add a Spring configuration file under ${basedir}/src/test/resources, say as client-test-config.xml and add the JAXWSProxyFactoryBean wiring so as to obtain a proxy object of the service exposed on a specific WSDL url.

<beans>
   <bean id="propConfig" class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
     <property name="systemPropertiesMode" value="2"/>
     <property name="location" value="classpath:mytest.properties"/>
   </bean>

   <bean id="wsclient"  class="mypackage.MyServiceInterface" factory-bean="wsFactory" factory-method="create"/>

   <bean id="wsFactory" class="org.apache.cxf.jaxws.JaxWsProxyFactoryBean">
      <property name="serviceClass" value="mypackage.MyServiceInterface"/>
      <property name="address" value="${myservice.wsdl.url}"/>
   </bean>
</beans>

3) Define a unit test-case using the Spring configuration file, to inject the proxy service bean, and invoke/unit test methods on the exposed service.

public class MyServiceTest extends UnitilsTestNG
{   @SpringApplicationContext
    public ConfigurableApplicationContext createApplicationContext()
    {  return new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("client-test-config.xml");
    }

    @SpringBean("wsclient")
     private MyServiceInterface myService;</span>
      //All your unit test methods annotated with @Test here</span>
}

Thats it!. Your webservice unit test infrastructure for Apache CXF on Unitils is ready for adding test cases.