netzooid

Whenever I do a major release I get a bit reflective about my software. We just released XFire 1.2 yesterday and I am a bit surprised by the success that XFire has achieved in the past 2.5 years of its life. When I first started working on XFire, I was pretty reluctant – who wants another SOAP framework afterall? There are interop issues, and things like WSDL aren’t exactly fun to work with. Well it turned out that a lot of people did. Our 1.2 release is our 3rd major release along with two other minor releases along the way!

Eventually though with software you need to make breaking changes, and XFire is coming to that point. I’ve been thinking about XFire 2.0 for a while. Some things which I had in mind were full JAX-WS support, WS-RM, WS-Policy, better JMS support, and many other things.

Around the time I was thinking about XFire 2.0 I met Debbie Moynihan from IONA for the first time. We started talking about XFire and Celtix, and it turned out the projects had a lot of the same goals, like implementing WS-* and JAX-WS. (For those who aren’t aware of Celtix, while it is marketed as an ESB on its website, it is in essence as JAX-WS implementation with support for WS-* and legacy non XML services as well.) Even more than having the same goals, it appeared the timing was right that we might be able to work together.

On June 20, the XFire and Celtix communties submitted a proposal to the Apache Software Foundation for a new project called CeltiXfire. CeltiXfire is a proposed merge of the XFire and Celtix communities and code. On July 22, the proposal was accepted. Just last week we got the new source code checked into Apache. We’ve been working on the merge for a while now and I’m very excited about how its coming along. It isn’t quite ready for users yet, but we’re going to be closing in on our first milestone very soon I think.

At this point, if you’re an XFire you’re probably wondering what the merge will look like. Well, when we first started off, it was clear that the XFire core had a lot of the right ideas, but it needed another revision. So we’ve created a better version of the core and are merging bits and pieces from each project on top of this. So we’ll still have great Spring support, easy POJO first services, schema first development, databinding support, and all the other things you love about XFire. But we’ll also have lots of things from Celtix like a complete JAX-WS implementaiton, WS-RM, better transports, and more.

For people who have written services with XFire, I think 99.9% of those services can stay the exact same, however you will need to update the way you configure and deploy these services. For instance, if you’re a Spring user, instead of using the XFireClientFactoryBean, you might use the CXFClientFactoryBean (which isn’t in SVN yet BTW).

For those looking for more information, the XFire site has a FAQ up for some common questions that I hear. If you have any further questions or would like to get involved, please sign up for the CXF mailing lists.

XFire 1.2 was finally released yesterday (and the users rejoiced!). I think the most useful feature to users is probably the new inheritance support in the Aegis binding. Basically this allows you to easily write POJO first services with your class hierarchy reflected in the WSDL. Other features include support for the very fast JiBX databinding and GZip support. Download and enjoy!

If you’re looking to find out more about this release, InfoQ has done a nice writeup with a small interview from me as well. At the bottom we talk a little bit about the XFire future. For those who don’t know, XFire 2.0 will be called CeltiXfire (CXF) 2.0. We’re merging with the Celtix project and will be at Apache. More on why this is a good thing and why I’m excited about it in a different post shortly…

Just a reminder for all the Grand Rapids, MI folks out there: BarCampGrandRapids starts tonight. Yes, there is still time to register (its free!) if you want to come.

Envoi Solutions will be sponsoring a party at the Grand Rapids Brewing Company at 9:30 PM. If you can’t make it to the unconference itself, try to make it down to have a drink and geek out.

I feel like I just participated in a cultural event of my generation. I believe I witnessed history by watching Snakes On a Plane.

Yes, thats me and my friend Rachel in “Snakes On a Plane” t-shirts that we won at the movie. And yes that is a green snake coming out of my shirt. Man, do I need a better camera phone.

For those of you aren’t familiar with the movie Snakes On a Plane, it is a thriller which is about nothing more than snakes on a plane. Well, it has slightly more plot than that, but really thats what it boils down to.

But lets talk about the cultural experience. Its 10PM on a Thursday night. The theatre is packed. Not only that, the crowd is screaming, chanting “snakes on a plane”, and making hissing noises. Why? An internet marketing phenomenon. Snakes on a plane wass the cult movie of the year/decade even before it was released. According to the wikipedia:

In recognition of the unprecedented Internet buzz for what had been a minor movie in their 2006 line-up, New Line Cinema ordered five days of additional shooting in early March 2006 (principal photography had wrapped in September 2005). While re-shoots normally imply problems with a film, the producers opted to add new scenes to the film to take the movie from PG-13 into R-rated territory and bring the movie in line with growing fan expectations. Among the additions is a line that originated as an Internet parody of Samuel L. Jackson’s traditional movie persona: “Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherf*ing snakes on this motherf*ing plane!”.

Yes, thats right. People came up with a line for Samuel L Jackson to say on the Internet, then they went back, shot that scene, and added it to the movie. Wow.

The movie itself is in someways an Airplane of this decade, except it could actually be taken seriously. I’m not sure if they originally planned to have it taken seriously as a film, but if you try to do that, you’re missing out on the fun. While the snakes will still scare you, the whole move is still absurd and quite amusing (provided you’re with the right crowd). It’ll be interesting to see how it does past opening night, when the people who aren’t cult fans watch it.

Tatu Saloranta just announced the release of Woodstox 3.0. For those who don’t know what Woodstox is, it is a StAX implementation and undoubtedly the best XML parser around. It is 30% faster than Xerces and highly conformant to the XML spec. Thanks Tatu for making the best parser around and helping continuously clarify the StAX API specification!