Deployment of Web Service-based IPF IHE consumer endpoints

Every project that exposes consumer endpoints of Web Service-based IPF IHE components needs to configure a web application container for them. Currently the following containers have been tested:

Standalone Apache Tomcat
Embedded in Spring Boot

Neccessary configuration steps for all these variants will be described in corresponding sections below.

Standalone Apache Tomcat

To make the IPF application deployable in the Apache Tomcat servlet container, a deployment descriptor web.xml must contain a reference to the application’s Spring context descriptor and include the CXF servlet. Here is an example:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 3.0//EN">

    <web-app>
      <display-name>Test IPF IHE Web-App</display-name>
      <context-param>
        <!-- configures the classpath of the Spring application context -->
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>classpath:path/to/your/context.xml</param-value>
      </context-param>

      <listener>
        <listener-class>
          org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener
        </listener-class>
      </listener>
      <servlet>
        <servlet-name>CXFServlet</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>
            org.apache.cxf.transport.servlet.CXFServlet
        </servlet-class>
      </servlet>
      <servlet-mapping>
        <!-- configures the address of the servlet path under which our web services are published -->
        <servlet-name>CXFServlet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/services/*</url-pattern>
      </servlet-mapping>
    </web-app>

Embedded in Spring Boot

Container deployments embedded in Spring Boot can be easily achieved by depending on ipf-xds-spring-boot-starter or ipf-hl7v3-spring-boot-starter. This starter module sets up the necessary servlets and the servlet init parameters are mapped to application properties.

Note that Spring Boot supports Tomcat, Jetty and Undertow as servlet implementations.