Complex WADL Processing in CXF

We have seen a number of JIRA issues opened against a WadlToJava generator since it was added to CXF 2.4.1. Seeing the community experimenting with it was really reassuring and it confirmed there was some genuine interest toward working with WADL. WADL was a really fine effort from Marc Hadley and it does seem to have nearly all it needs to move from a submission to a final recommendation.

One of the major contributions to the CXF WadlToJava code generator came from Christos Fragoulides who did help to push it to the next level by providing a lot of feedback and fixes while working with a more up-to-date WADL document describing Rackspace Cloud Servers API. They have a complex WADL document which utilizes most of the WADL capabilities and it is in such cases where one can start seeing the advantages of being able to get a document and start testing the server in a matter of minutes. By the way, Rackspace, hope we can see a more up-do-date WADL document live soon :-).

Then, when I already thought that our WADL code generator was flying high, came another very good contribution from Lars Weber which should make it possible to get a useful code from WADL descriptions like this one. Now the generator supports local references for all the WADL elements, in addition to external resource references.

Note that the AtomPub example relies on a WADL link element which can be used to identify a portion of the representation. How one can get to a portion of the representation in CXF JAX-RS ? Easy, use an XPathProvider.

So please try the WADL code generator in CXF 2.5.0, stress it more and provide the valuable feedback.