In Apache Camel, the CXF component is the key to integrating routes with Web services. You can use the CXF component to create two different kinds of endpoint:

The cxf:bean: URI is used to bind an Apache CXF endpoint to a route and has the following general syntax:

cxf:bean:CxfEndpointID[?Options]

Where CxfEndpointID is the ID of a bean created using the cxf:cxfEndpoint element, which configures the details of the WS endpoint. You can append options to this URI (where the options are described in detail in CXF in EIP Component Reference). Provider mode is essentially a variant of PAYLOAD mode: you could specify this mode on the URI (by setting dataFormat=PAYLOAD), but this is not necessary, because PAYLOAD mode is already selected by the @ServiceMode annotation on the custom Provider class.

For example, to start a route with an endpoint in provider mode, where the endpoint is configured by the customer-ws bean, define the route as follows:

<route>
    <from uri="cxf:bean:customer-ws"/>
    ...
</route>

The cxf:cxfEndpoint element is used to define a WS endpoint that binds either to the start (consumer endpoint) or the end (producer endpoint) of a route. For example, to define the customer-ws WS endpoint in provider mode, you define a cxf:cxfEndpoint element as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans ...>
    ...  
    <cxf:cxfEndpoint id="customer-ws"
        address="/Customer"
        endpointName="c:SOAPOverHTTP"
        serviceName="c:CustomerService"
        wsdlURL="wsdl/CustomerService.wsdl"
        serviceClass="com.fusesource.customerwscamelcxfprovider.SAXSourceService"
        xmlns:c="http://demo.fusesource.com/wsdl/CustomerService/"/>
    ...
</beans>

The wsdlURL attribute of the cxf:cxfEndpoint element is used to specify the location of the WSDL contract for this endpoint. The WSDL contract is used as the source of metadata for this endpoint.

A key difference between provider mode and ordinary PAYLOAD mode is that the serviceClass attribute must be set to the provider class, SAXSourceService.