Can a web service return a stream?

Question

I\'ve been writing a little application that will let people upload & download files to me. I\'ve added a web service to this applciation to provide the upload/download fun

Answer 1

Yes, a webservice can do streaming. I created a webservice using Apache Axis2 and MTOM to support rendering PDF documents from XML. Since the resulting files could be quite large, streaming was important because we didn't want to keep it all in memory. Take a look at Oracle's documentation on streaming SOAP attachments.

Alternately, you can do it yourself, and tomcat will create the Chunked headers. This is an example of a spring controller function that streams.

 @RequestMapping(value = "/stream")
        public void hellostreamer(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws CopyStreamException, IOException  
{

            response.setContentType("text/xml");
            OutputStreamWriter writer = new OutputStreamWriter (response.getOutputStream());
            writer.write("this is streaming");
            writer.close();

    }