Recently in a project I encountered the following problem: The development team used Git with a branch-per-feature-like workflow and the integration server, Bamboo in this case, was configured not only to run the integration-tests for the master-branch but also for every change in a feature branch.

As the team  developed a Java EE web application ports like 8080 occasionally were already bound and builds failed.

I knew a plug-in for Jenkins CI I to search for available ports and assign them to a build variable but I wanted to control such information directly within the Maven build life-cycle so I searched and finally found Sonatype’s Port Allocator Plug-in for Maven.

In the following short example I’m going to demonstrate how to allocate available random ports in a Maven build and assign them to an embedded servlet container.

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Using the contract-first approach to define a web service offers some advantages in contrast to the code-first approach.

In the following tutorial we’re going to take a look at some details of this approach and we’re going to implement a real SOAP service using JAX-WS, Maven and the Eclipse IDE.

Finally we’re going to run our service implementation on an embedded Jetty instance and we’re going to take a look at soapUI and how to test our service using this neat tool.

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