I have a legacy HTTP server where I need to send an XML file over HTTP request (POST) using Java (not browser) and the server will respond with another XML in its HTTP response. It is similar to Web Service but there's no WSDL and I have to follow the existing XML structure to construct my XML to be sent.

I have done a research and found an example that matches my requirement here. The example uses HttpClient from Apache Commons. (There are also other examples I found but they use java.net networking package (like URLConnection) which is tedious so I don't want to use them).

But it's also my requirement to use Spring and JMS.

I know from Spring's reference that it's possible to combine HttpClient, JMS and Spring. My question is, how?

Note that it's NOT in my requirement to use HttpClient. If you have a better suggestion, I'm welcome.

Appreciate it.

For your reference, here's the XML-over-HTTP example I've been talking about:

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import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;

import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.InputStreamRequestEntity;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.PostMethod;

/**
 *
 * This is a sample application that demonstrates
 * how to use the Jakarta HttpClient API.
 *
 * This application sends an XML document
 * to a remote web server using HTTP POST
 *
 * @author Sean C. Sullivan
 * @author Ortwin Glück
 * @author Oleg Kalnichevski
 */
public class PostXML {

    /**
     *
     * Usage:
     *          java PostXML http://mywebserver:80/ c:\foo.xml
     *
     *  @param args command line arguments
     *                 Argument 0 is a URL to a web server
     *                 Argument 1 is a local filename
     *
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

        if (args.length != 2) {
            System.out.println(
                "Usage: java -classpath <classpath> [-Dorg.apache.commons."+
                "logging.simplelog.defaultlog=<loglevel>]" +
                " PostXML <url> <filename>]");

            System.out.println("<classpath> - must contain the "+
                "commons-httpclient.jar and commons-logging.jar");

            System.out.println("<loglevel> - one of error, "+
                    "warn, info, debug, trace");

            System.out.println("<url> - the URL to post the file to");
            System.out.println("<filename> - file to post to the URL");
            System.out.println();
            System.exit(1);
        }

        // Get target URL
        String strURL = args[0];

        // Get file to be posted
        String strXMLFilename = args[1];
        File input = new File(strXMLFilename);

        // Prepare HTTP post
        PostMethod post = new PostMethod(strURL);

        // Request content will be retrieved directly
        // from the input stream
        // Per default, the request content needs to be buffered
        // in order to determine its length.
        // Request body buffering can be avoided when
        // content length is explicitly specified
        post.setRequestEntity(new InputStreamRequestEntity(
                new FileInputStream(input), input.length()));

        // Specify content type and encoding
        // If content encoding is not explicitly specified
        // ISO-8859-1 is assumed
        post.setRequestHeader(
                "Content-type", "text/xml; charset=ISO-8859-1");

        // Get HTTP client
        HttpClient httpclient = new HttpClient();

        // Execute request
        try {

            int result = httpclient.executeMethod(post);

            // Display status code
            System.out.println("Response status code: " + result);

            // Display response
            System.out.println("Response body: ");
            System.out.println(post.getResponseBodyAsString());

        } finally {
            // Release current connection to the connection pool 
            // once you are done
            post.releaseConnection();
        }
    }
}