Sorry fot his newbie question. But I really need a start on this one. I want to access a webservice in my Java EE project. This webservice offers a WSDL file. So I understand I can use this to build Java code from it to access the web service. Now I read that Apache CXF is a good framework that I can use. But what's the difference to JAX-WS?
Could someone please explain this to me?
JAX-WS is a Specification (provided by Sun Oracle) to defining Web Services by use of Annotations.
Apache CXF is a framework that implements JAX-WS to generate Web Services Definitions and Java Proxy (from a Web Service Definitions)
Apache Axis 2 is also a framework that now supports JAX-WS (up to JAX-WS 2). It's an improvement from Apache Axis. CXF supports up to JAX-WS 1.2.
Brief tutorial can be found here.
JAX-WS is an API (or specification) and CXF is an implementation of that API. There is also a reference implementation available here
CXF is good but you don't need it to solve your problem. You can use wsimport, which comes as part of the JDK, to generate classes from the WSDL to access the web service.
