XML and Web Services with Groovy

Groovy provides excellent facilities for parsing and creating XML. As well as providing syntactic sugar on top of traditional Java-based parsing approaches (e.g. SAX, DOM, StAX), it has its own XmlParser and XmlSlurper libraries which support XPath-like expressions at the object level (akin to LINQ in the .Net world). In addition, Groovy's markup builders provide an elegant and efficient way to create and modify XML.
Groovy also has various options available for SOAP and RESTful web services. We'll examine the most popular of these.

We'll cover:

  • Reading, creating and updating XML using various approaches including the pros and cons of the various parsers and markup builders
  • dealing with XML namespaces and XPath
  • using other XML frameworks: XOM, Dom4j, JDom
  • integrating with XSLT, XQuery and validators
  • treating non-XML like XML
  • GroovySOAP, GroovyWS and Spring web services
  • JAXB, XmlBeans, CXF and Axis2 for SOAP web services
  • XML-RPC and RESTful options, RSS, ATOM
  • trade-offs using Apache Xerces or with native XML support on 1.4 through to 1.7 JVMs
  • Testing Web services with SoapUI
  • A quick look at Groovy integration in common XML/web-service tools
  • Groovy use in web service related products including ESBs and SOA frameworks

Paul King

About Paul King

Paul King, a member of the OCI Groovy team, leads ASERT, an organization based in Brisbane, Australia, which provides software development, training, and mentoring services to customers looking to embrace new technologies, harness best practices, and innovate. He has been contributing to open source projects for nearly 20 years and is an active committer on numerous projects, including Groovy. Paul speaks at international conferences, publishes in software magazines and journals, and is a co-author of Manning's best-seller, Groovy in Action.

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