Asynchronous JAX-RS Proxies in CXF

Dan had an idea the other day to get CXF JAX-RS proxies enhanced a bit for them to support the asynchronous calls. After all, HTTP centric JAX-RS 2.0 and CXF WebClient clients support such calls with AsyncInvoker.

So here is what we have started from. Simply register InvocationCallback with a proxy request context as shown in the examples and make the asynchronous call. The proxy method will return immediately and the callback will be notified in due time once the typed response is available. As the examples show one can register a single callback or a collection of callbacks bound to specific response types.

I suppose we can consider generating typed asynchronous proxy methods from the service descriptions such as WADL going forward.

This feature will be available in CXF 3.1.7. Give a try please, refresh your JAX-RS proxy code a bit, enjoy. 

Apache CXF JAX-RS and SAML Assertions

While the software industry with the interests in WEB security is enthusiastically embracing the latest and coolest technologies such as OpenId Connect and JOSE, with JSON Web Tokens being the stars of the advanced security flows, less 'glamorous' SAML security tokens have been continuing helping to secure the existing services.

CXF JAX-RS has been providing a comprehensive support for SAML assertions for a while now which is being relied upon in a number of productions. I'd also like to encourage the developers who work with SAML give this access control feature a try.

The question which is often being asked is how a JAX-RS client gets these assertions. Please read this informative blog post explaining how CXF JAX-RS clients can seamlessly get a SAML assertion from a WS STS service and use it with the server validating it against STS or locally.

Please also check this section if you are you curious how to reuse SAML assertions in OAuth2 flows.