Friday, November 20, 2015

WADL and Swagger United in Apache CXF

Who could've thought that Swagger and WADL can be real friends ?
Both Swagger and WADL are about describing REST APIs and while the former has a definite momentum, the latter has proved to be very capable and helpful to JAX-RS users.

The important thing is that we have users who submit WADL documents  to the runtime or build time code generators which is all working fine. We also have Swagger users who use cool Swagger features and being happy with a nice UI being generated. And WADL users, while being happy with WADL (which IMHO is indeed a very capable language for describing schema rich XML but with some extensions - even JSON - services) would like to use Swagger to introspect the code generated by WADL processors and have a nice API UI.

So my colleague Andrei and  Francesco, Apache Syncope maestro, have driven the work about enhancing a WADL generator to set WADL documentation fragments as Java Docs in the generated sources and then having CXF Swagger features being very smart about enhancing Swagger JSON payloads with these Java Docs, with Francesco doing some magic there. I should also mention Andriy Redko doing some work earlier on directly with Swagger for it to better support JAX-RS annotations and initiating the CXF Swagger project and Aki Yoshida doing a lot of Swagger2 work next.

So here you go, WADL and Swagger United in Apache CXF.

IMHO this project has been a perfect example of the power of the Open Source collaboration with the contributors from different teams working effectively on this project.


HTrace your Apache CXF Service flows

Andriy Redko keeps pushing CXF to the next level with adding new features nearly every few weeks :-).

One of his latest projects has been to do with wiring Apache HTrace into CXF such that CXF users can HTrace calls starting from CXF clients going to CXF servers and then to such HTrace aware containers as HBase  and using the collectors like Zipkin.

I'm looking forward to Andriy talking in detail about it on his blog and at the conferences, but in meantime you can check the documentation. Note that it works not only for JAX-RS but for JAX-WS too: if we can have a new feature working with both frontends then you know it will be done. The demo is here.

Give it a try and stay on top of the web services game :-)
Enjoy !



 

JAX-RS 2.1 specification work has started

JAX-RS 2.1 specification work has finally started after a rather quiet year and this is a good news for JAX-RS users at large and CXF JAX-RS users in particular.
JAX-RS 2.1 is entirely Java 8 based and a number of new enhancements are on the way. I was concerned earlier on that having a Java 8 will slow down the adoption but I think now the spec leads were right, Java 8 is so rich and JAX-RS needs to be open to accepting the latest Java features - ultimately this is what will excite the users.

The main new features list is: support for Server-Sent Events (something CXF users will enjoy experimenting with while also keeping in mind CXF has some great WebSocket support done by Aki), enhanced NIO support and introducing a reactive mode into Client API.

I've already mentioned before that JAX-RS 2.0 AsyncResponse API is IMHO very impressive as it makes a fairly complex task of dealing with suspended invocations becoming rather trivial to deal with. Marek and Santiago are doing it again with the new 2.1 proposals. Of course there will be some minor disagreements here and there but overall I'm very positive about this new JAX-RS project.


We now have a CXF Java 8 master branch to support the future JAX-RS 2.1 features but having a Java 8 trunk is great for all of the CXF community.

What is really good is that there appears to be no obvious end to the new requirements coming into the JAX-RS space. The HTTP services space is wide open, with the new ideas generated around the security, faster processing, etc, and it all will be eventually available as future JAX-RS features. I'm confident JAX-RS 3.0 will be coming in due time too.