Spring Beans Injection in JAX-WS / Tomcat 7 (@WebServices) - Does not work, returns NullPointerException (NPE)

I would like to inject ( @Autowired or @Resource ) beans created by Spring ( 3.x or 4.x ) into a class that implements a JAX-WS interface (reference implementation).

I tested it on Tomcat 6 and it works, but on Tomcat 7, it looks like the container specification has changed and the contexts are different.

I have already used the proposed integration (which even has bad documentation) as suggested in:

In this example, the sun-jaxws.xml file is replaced by a Spring configuration file. However, in my example I'm doing everything with @Configuration , since I was trying to avoid XMLs. I do not know how to make this change to the JAX-WS Endpoint to be able to use a spring-injected bean, without having to use applicationContext.getBean("meuBean") .

Note: I read everything, believe me. Some suggest extending SpringBeanAutowiringSupport , others putting @PostConstructor , but nothing works on Tomcat 7.

Is it a container definition? Can not really do it? This is the main question, for me to give up once and for all. ;)

UPDATE

@utluiz, thanks for the reply. Basically I used the Mkyong example, however I want to do the injection without XML and the configuration through the @Configuration java class I created. Meu web.xml looks like this:

             org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener     

<!-- Configure ContextLoaderListener to use AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext
        instead of the default XmlWebApplicationContext -->
<context-param>
    <param-name>contextClass</param-name>
    <param-value>
        org.springframework.web.context.support.AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext
    </param-value>
</context-param>
<!-- Configuration locations must consist of one or more comma- or space-delimited
   fully-qualified @Configuration classes. Fully-qualified packages may also be
   specified for component-scanning -->
<context-param>
    <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
    <param-value>com.mkyong.ContextConfiguration</param-value>
</context-param>


<servlet>
    <servlet-name>jaxws-servlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>
        com.sun.xml.ws.transport.http.servlet.WSSpringServlet
    </servlet-class>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>jaxws-servlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/hello/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

and my configuration class:

@Configuration
@ComponentScan(basePackages = "com.mkyong")
@ImportResource({"classpath*:/applicationContext.xml"})
public class ContextConfiguration {

}

However, the endpoint mapping gets in this xml (applicationContext.xml) as follows:

<wss:binding url="/hello">
    <wss:service>
        <ws:service bean="#helloWorldWS"/>
    </wss:service>
</wss:binding>

<!-- Web service methods -->
<bean id="helloWs" class="com.mkyong.ws.HelloWorldWS">
    <property name="helloWorldBo" ref="HelloWorldBo" />
</bean>

<bean id="HelloWorldBo" class="com.mkyong.bo.impl.HelloWorldBoImpl" />

I would like to remove this XML, for this, I need to configure the wss:binding stretch within my class @Configuration in java. This I do not know how to do.

Note: It would be okay to use this XML as well, but I wanted to do the injections via java and not via XML. But it seems that spring ignores the applicationContext.xml when I use the context setting via java.

I do not know if it was clear, the case is that I have no problem with the following snippet being in the XML:

<wss:binding url="/hello">
    <wss:service>
        <ws:service bean="#helloWorldWS"/>
    </wss:service>
</wss:binding>

I just want to remove the bean definitions, so I can use @Resource / @Autowired and @Component .