XFire should strip any leading and trailing whitespace from the service name. The following "pretty-printed" services.xml leads to erratic behaviour at runtime (the service cannot be accessed, the services overview page exhibits strange "growing URL" effects when trying browse the WSDL). This is apparently caused by leading/trailing whitespace and/or newline characters that are not stripped from the service name element as one would normally expect. <beans xmlns="http://xfire.codehaus.org/config/1.0"> <service> <name> sv-haushalt-personen </name> <serviceClass> at.xyz.sv.haushalt.personen.service.Personen </serviceClass> ... </beans> Note that there is no such problem with the serviceClass and implementationClass elements.