Jettison 1.3.1 has been released

Jettison 1.3.1 has just been released, please the Download page for more information about the latest fixes.

The two updates which would be of interest to CXF users (or those who rely on other stacks that ship the providers wrapping Jettison) are to do with making it possible to create formatted JSON outputs and making sure that the ignorable (empty) text content (reported by JAXB when processing the mixed content data) is blocked. The latter update, among other things, will make the WADL JSON representations look nicer given that they are produced from the wrapped XML payload.

Few other improvements made it into this release too, particularly those JIRAs which had the patches attached to them have been resolved.

I'd like to encourage the Jettison community to continue providing patches and as far as I'm concerned I can say that the patches will be eventually applied and the fixes will make it into the the future Jettison releases.

Happy New Year !

Associating user login names with OAuth Access tokens

The classical OAuth flow involves the authorized 3rd-party client magically accessing the end user's resources without even specifying a user name or id, for example:

GET /user/calendar

How can the server figure out which resource to return ? The answer is that the request will have an Authorization header with an access token key and in OAuth 1.0 the token needs to get the information about the end user authorizing a given 3rd party consumer associated with it at the authorization time.

With this association in place, the server will have an easy way to get to the name or id of the user used to authorize the client, and the way to do it in soon to be released CXF 2.5.1 is documented here.

I'd like to thank Glen for helping me with getting this enhancement done.

We are continuing working on the demo which will show most of the CXF OAuth support in practice. Please stay tuned to see how you can write secure OAuth applications with CXF :-)

Locator Support For RESTful Services in Talend ESB

Back in June I blogged about CXF JAX-RS providing a fail-over support for RESTful Java clients and mentioned some relevant work started in Talend.

Things are happening in the Talend land where all the interesting new features in Apache projects that our Coders team is contributing to are taken on board, analyzed and wired in the products real fast. And the newly released Talend ESB 5 brings a Locator support for RESTful endpoints and clients with the client-side Locator feature built on top of the CXF fail-over mechanism. Kudos to the ESB team for implementing it.

If you get a working HTTP-centric code then having such a code not hard-coding the endpoint address of the RESTful server which is part of the large WEB application and seeing it working even after a given server or the HTTP connection to it goes down will be encouraging.

Are you all into writing large RESTful applications end-to-end ? Have problems answering to your friends who like working with SOAP (they are still your friends though :-)) and tell you that with REST it's not possible to write Locator-aware fail-over capable clients ? If the answer to either of those 2 questions is yes then go to a new Talend web site, download Talend ESB v5, get to /examples/talend/tesb/locator-rest and proceed from there.

One thing I should mention is that Talend Open Studio for ESB is also available for download, it builds on top of Talend Data Integration suite and offers a second-to-none UI support for developing web services and routes. If you work with CXF SOAP Web Services or Camel then you probably won't be able to get back to your old UI tools after trying Talend Open Studio for ESB.

And the good news is that we are working on bringing the users a tooling for developing RESTful applications. It is a work in progress but it's happening, stay tuned !