Does Spring Ws handle certificates automatically in a two way SSL connection or we have to handle certificates manually(such as sending and verification of certificates)
If you want to consume a HTTPS web service from your Spring application then you will need to make sure that the service's SSL certificate is present in your application/web server's key store. This you have to do explicitly, Spring doesn't help in it, Spring is a framework which makes life easier by hiding a lot of coding complexities.
If you are not aware then in a 2 way SSL communication, a SSL enabled client will send a request to a SSL enabled server, now many things happens, but the one which interests you is - server will send its SSL certificate (a SSL certificate will be signed by a CA or self), now client will be if the SSL certificate's CA or any intermediate CA is present in its key store, if so then it marks certificate verification as pass, else fail.
Browsers has build in list of trusted CA, now since in your case it is server-server communication so you need to make sure that the consuming service's SSL certificate is present in your server's keystore else your server will not be able to trust that certificate and hence SSL connection will not establish.