...
Two sides of MTOM
MTOM can to be enabled on both the client and the server side. If it is done on the client side, then the SOAP requests with binary data are "MTOMized" and if it is done on the server side, then the responses are. So far, it seems that either client or server (generated by CXF) can handle both MTOM (multipart/related) and non-MTOM (text/xml) SOAP messages in runtime without knowing in advance what type should be received. I am affraid that some old WS client won't be able to provide such a functionality, therefore new set of methods with MTOM support has to be created in order not to break backward compatibility wtih MTOM clients not understanding the MTOM/XOP coding. Another backward compatible solution could be for instance to return MTOMed message if and only if there is some special attribute in HTTP header of SOAP request, however, I haven't found how to change this behaviour of WS programmatically in runtime.
...