To generate a WSDL contract from your SEI, you can use either the java2ws command-line utility or the cxf-java2ws-plugin Maven plug-in. The plug-in approach is ideal for Maven-based projects: after you paste the requisite plug-in configuration into your POM file, the WSDL code generation step is integrated into your build.

Configuring the Java-to-WSDL Maven plug-in is relatively easy, because most of the default configuration settings can be left as they are. After copying and pasting the sample plugin element into your project's POM file, there are just a few basic settings that need to be customized, as follows:

For example, the following POM fragment shows how to configure the cxf-java2ws-plugin plug-in to generate WSDL from the CustomerService SEI:

<project ...>
  ...
  <properties>
    <cxf.version>2.4.2-fuse-00-05</cxf.version>
  </properties>
  
  <build>
    <defaultGoal>install</defaultGoal>
    <plugins>
      ...
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.cxf</groupId>
        <artifactId>cxf-java2ws-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>${cxf.version}</version>
        <dependencies>
          <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.cxf</groupId>
            <artifactId>cxf-rt-frontend-jaxws</artifactId>
            <version>${cxf.version}</version>
          </dependency>
          <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.cxf</groupId>
            <artifactId>cxf-rt-frontend-simple</artifactId>
            <version>${cxf.version}</version>
          </dependency>
        </dependencies>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>process-classes</id>
            <phase>process-classes</phase>
            <configuration>
              <className>org.fusesource.demo.camelcxf.ws.server.CustomerService</className>
              <outputFile>${basedir}/../src/main/resources/wsdl/CustomerService.wsdl</outputFile>
              <genWsdl>true</genWsdl>
              <verbose>true</verbose>
            </configuration>
            <goals>
              <goal>java2ws</goal>
            </goals>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>

</project>

When using the Java-first approach to defining a Web service, there are typically other parts of your application (for example, WS clients) that depend on the generated WSDL file. For this reason, it is generally a good idea to output the generated WSDL file to a common location, which is accessible to other projects in your application, using the outputFile configuration element.

If you do not specify the outputFile configuration element, the generated WSDL is sent to the following location, by default:

BaseDir/target/generated/wsdl/SEIClassName.wsdl

For full details of how to configure the Java-to-WSDL plug-in, see the Maven Java2WS plug-in reference page.