Updates to the CXF JAXRS runtime

Updates to the CXF JAX-RS runtime have been somewhat limited during the last few months due the ongoing high-priority internal project I've been assigned to contribute to. This project is likely to continue for another couple of months.

Given this, I've focused on working on some of the issues which users have asked on the CXF lists a number of times, directly or indirectly.

So here is what has been done for CXF 2.2.5 :

1. Redirection support, both at the CXFServlet (check the Redirection section) and CXF JAX-RS levels. Users can redirect to static or dynamic resources such as JSP, or to some other servlets.

2. Additional updates to the way JAXB/JSON inputs/outputs can be customized. The purpose of this feature is to let users do simple input/output updates by changing, dropping or appending elements and or attributes. For example, it is now should be possible to deserialize the sequence of JSON arrays without a root element.

3. Few minor updates to JSONProvider, such as a BadgerFish convention support and a fix to let CXF JAXRS endpoints interact with the Dojo JSON RestStore (patch has been submitted).

4. Improvements to the way multipart/form-data requests are handled.

5. ResourceComparator extension which can let users affect the way multiple matching resource classes or methods are selected.

6. Documentation annotation has been added for more descriptive WADLs be generated

For the next couple of months or so, due the above-mentioned internal project, I will continue focusing on making the localized updates which will may make the difference for CXF JAXRS users. Plus do some JAX-RS 1.1 work and try to contribute to Andy's Atom logging project. I will not have time to do any Java EE work as mandated by the JAX-RS 1.1 maintenance spec - I'll rather focus on working on more down to earth issues for 2.3. By the way, if anyone out there is contemplating contributing to CXF JAX-RS then doing the EJB or other EE-related JAX-RS 1.1 tasks will be welcomed.