netzooid

Thomas just announced that JBoss has been working on making their WS layer pluggable. In addition to supporting the native JBossWS framework, CXF and Metro (the project formerly know as the JAX-WS RI + Tango) integration code will be added for the 2.1.0 release as well. Among other things, this should help make it easier for CXF/Metro users to deploy services and create EJB backed web services inside JBoss.

I’m very happy to see this. Its not uncommon for me to visit a customer who is mixing different stacks together. Its part of the promise of open source, you can pick the best technologies (dare I use the marketing term - best of breed), and integrate them together.

Its great to see JBoss/RedHat support this approach.

<horn-tooting>

Coincidentally, why might you want to use CXF within JBoss [1][2]?

• Spring integration - we have lots of lovely support for the Spring 2.0 syntax. Its trivial to make a Spring bean a web service. Just write a <jaxws:endpoint … /> snippet and you’re done It equally trivial to inject a WS client into your application.
• JAX-WS frontend - Use the standard JAX-WS APIs to build your services via annotations
• Simple frontend - CXF supports the building of services with no annotations needed through the simple frontend. It works well in conjunction with the Aegis databinding, which can generate schemas from just about anything - including Map<Foo, Bar> constructs (maybe someday JAXB will support that).
• RESTful services via annotations
• WS-* support - including Addressing, Policy, Security, and ReliableMessaging
• The ability to work with non-XML data like JSON
• Maven Plugins

</horn-tooting>
1. Important: this is not to imply that the JBossWS Native or Metro does not have any particular one of these features, I just think it is this combination that makes CXF unique.

2. Disclaimer: The JBossWS code is an ongoing effort and the CXF code still isn’t quite ready yet AFAIK. I would encourage you to get involved though if this interests you. Also, CXF can still be run standalone inside JBoss in the mean time - many users do that already.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 3:51 am and is filed under Javercising, Tech Ramblings, Web Services.