Apache CXF: An Open Source Service Framework

Overview

Apache CXF is an open source services framework. CXF helps you build and develop services using frontend programming APIs, like JAX-WS. These services can speak a variety of protocols such as SOAP, XML/HTTP, RESTful HTTP, or CORBA and work over a variety of transports such as HTTP, JMS or JBI.

CXF includes a broad feature set, but it is primarily focused on the following areas:

Web Services Standards Support: CXF supports a variety of web service standards including SOAP, the Basic Profile, WSDL, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-Security.
Frontends: CXF supports a variety of "frontend" programming models. CXF implements the JAX-WS APIs (version 2.0 will be TCK compliant). It also includes a "simple frontend" which allows creation of clients and endpoints without annotations. CXF supports both contract first development with WSDL and code first development starting from Java.
Ease of use: CXF is designed to be intuitive and easy to use. There are simple APIs to quickly build code-first services, Maven plug-ins to make tooling integration easy, JAX-WS API support, Spring 2.0 XML support to make configuration a snap, and much more.
Binary and Legacy Protocol Support: CXF has been designed to provide a pluggable architecture that supports not only XML but also non-XML type bindings, such as JSON and CORBA, in combination with any type of transport.

To get started using CXF, check out the downloads, the user's guide, or the mailing lists to get more information!

JavaOne Meetup 2008

Come meet with the folks behind Apache ActiveMQ, Camel, CXF and ServiceMix at JavaOne!

Please join us for an evening of food, drinks, conversation and open source antics at the Zebulon Cafe - (Google Map) in San Francisco on Monday, May 5, 2008 from 6-9PM. Some of the Apache committers behind these dynamic projects that will be there include Dan Kulp, Hiram Chirino, Guillaume Nodet, Rob Davies, Chris Custine and Bruce Snyder. ActiveMQ and Camel are each readying the next releases, CXF just graduated from the Incubator and the shiny, new ServiceMix 4.0 release is right around the corner. A big thanks to IONA Technologies for sponsoring this event. We hope to see you there!

In an attempt to help predict the head count, please add your name to the registration page.

News

Monday, April 28, 2008

Apache CXF 2.1 Released!

The Apache Incubator CXF team is proud to announce the availability of the 2.1 release!

What's new in CXF 2.1:

JAX-WS 2.1 support - the JAX-WS implementation has been updated to the JAX-WS 2.1 specification level. Code generatation is JAX-WS 2.1/JAXB 2.1 compliant.

Initial implementation of JAX-RS 0.6 REST based service framework.

Javascript client generation and support - SOAP based endpoints can have javascript clients created automatically with ?js URL. There is also command line tooling.

CORBA binding merged from Yoko - JAX-WS Clients/Servers can talk IIOP to allow communication with other CORBA processess. Tooling for IDL -> WSDL, WSDL -> IDL, etc... are there to support this.

New java2ws tooling to support better "java first" development patterns.

xmlbeans runtime support to allow using XmlBeans for the data model.

MANY MANY bugfixes, performance enhancements, etc... Too numerous to list individually.

Finally, the major new "non-code" feature:

This is our first release after graduating from the incubator as a Top Level Project. Thus, this is a full "non-incubator" release.

Posted at 28 Apr @ 12:22 PM by

Daniel Kulp |

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Goals

General

High Performance
Extensible
Intuitive & Easy to Use

Support for Standards

JAX-WS, JAX-WSA, JSR-181, and SAAJ
SOAP 1.1, 1.2, WS-I BasicProfile, WS-Security, WS-Addressing, WS-RM and WS-Policy
WSDL 1.1 and 2.0
MTOM

Multiple Transports, Bindings, Data Bindings, and Formats

Bindings: SOAP, REST/HTTP
Data bindings: JAXB 2.0, Aegis.(XMLBeans, Castor and JiBX will be supported in CXF 2.1)
Formats: XML, JSON
Transports: HTTP, Servlet, JMS, and Jabber transports
Extensibility API allows additional bindings for CXF, enabling additional message format support such as CSV and fixed record length

Flexible Deployment

Lightweight containers: deploy services in Tomcat or Spring-based containers
JBI integration: deploy as a service engine in a JBI container such as ServiceMix, OpenESB or Petals
SCA integration: deploy in an SCA container such as Tuscany
J2EE integration: deploy services in J2EE application servers such as Geronimo, JOnAS, JBoss, WebLogic, and WebSphere
Standalone Java client/server

Support for Multiple Programming Languages

Full support for JAX-WS 2.0 client/server programming model
JAX-WS 2.0 synchronous, asynchronous and one-way API's
JAX-WS 2.0 Dynamic Invocation Interface (DII) API
Support for wrapped and non-wrapped styles
XML messaging API
Support for JavaScript and ECMAScript 4 XML (E4X) - both client and server
Support for CORBA with Yoko
Support for SCA withTuscany
Support for JBI with ServiceMix

Code Generation

Java to WSDL
WSDL to Java
XSD to WSDL
WSDL to XML
WSDL to SOAP
WSDL to service

Getting Involved

Apache CXF is currently under heavy development. To get involved you can subscribe to the mailing lists. You can also grab the code from the Source Repository. You also need to read about Building CXF. For Eclipse users, you should read about Setting up Eclipse.

Apache CXF

Users

API Documentation (Javadoc)

Developers

ASF