CXF Spring Boot Starters Unveiled

The very first check some new users may do these days, while evaluating your JAX-RS implementation, can be: how well is it integrated into SpringBoot ?

And the good news is that Apache CXF 3.1.7 users can start working with SpringBoot real fast.
 
We have left it somewhat late. It is hard to prioritize sometimes on various new requirements. And see some users moving away. In such cases the community support is paramount. And the Power of Open Source Collaboration came to the rescue once again when it was really needed.

I'd like to start with thanking James for providing an initial set of links to various SpringBoot documentation pages and reacting positively to the initial code we had. But you know yourself - sometimes we all value some little 'starters' - the initial code contributions :-)

And then we had a Spring Boot expert coming in and getting the process moving. Vedran Pavic helped me to create the auto-configuration and starter modules for JAX-RS and JAX-WS, patiently explained how his initial contribution works, how these modules have to be designed, and helped with the advice throughout the process. I felt like I passed some SpringBoot qualification exam once we were finished which let me continue enhancing the JAX-RS starter independently before CXF 3.1.7 was released.

CXF Spring Boot starters are now documented at this page which is also linked to from a Spring Boot README listing the community contributions.

If you are working with CXF JAX-RS then do check this section. See the demos and get excited about the ease with which you can enable JAX-RS endpoints, their Swagger API docs (and auto-link Swagger UI - the topic of the next post).

See how you can run your CXF WebClient or Proxy clients in Spring Boot, initialized if needed from the metadata found a Netflix Eureka. The demo code on the master uses a CXF CircuitBreakerFailoverFeature written by a legendary DevMind, a sound, simple and light-weight Apache Zest based implementation.
Not all users may realize how flexible CXF Failover Feature is. 

While the most effort went into a JAX-RS starter I'm sure we will add more support for JAX-WS users too.

We'll need to do a bit more work - link CXF statistics to the actuator endpoints, support scanning JAX-RS Applications and few other things.

If you prefer working with Spring Boot: be certain that a second to none support for running CXF services in Spring Boot will be there. Enjoy!