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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 8:01 am and is filed under Random.