Spring Web Services (Spring-WS) is one of the project developed by the Spring Community. Its prime focus is to create document-driven Web Services. The Spring Web Services project facilitates contract-first SOAP service development, provides multiple ways to create flexible web services, which can manipulate XML payloads in multiple ways. Being Spring based, Spring Web Services uses Spring Concepts like Dependency Injection and Configurations seamlessly. Spring-WS requires Spring 3.0 version. 

Spring Framework was initially written by Rod Johnson and was first released under the Apache 2.0 license in June 2003. This tutorial has been written based on the Spring Framework Version 4.1.6 released in March 2015.

Audience 

This tutorial is designed for Java Programmers with a need to understand the Spring Web Services Framework in detail along with its architecture and actual usage. This tutorial will bring the readers to the intermediate level of expertise and from there they can take themselves to a higher level of proficiency. 

Prerequisites 

Before proceeding with this tutorial, you should have a good understanding of Java Programming Language. Additionally, understanding of the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is also required because all the examples have been compiled using the Eclipse IDE.