SwaggerUI in CXF or what Child's Play really means

We've had an extensive demonstration of how to enable Swagger UI for CXF endpoints returning Swagger documents for a while but the only 'problem' was that our demos only showed how to unpack a SwaggerUI module into a local folder with the help of a Maven plugin and make these unpacked resources available to browsers.
It was not immediately obvious to the users how to activate SwaggerUI and with the news coming from a SpringBoot land that apparently it is really easy over there to do it it was time to look at making it easier for CXF users.
So Aki, Andriy and myself talked and this is what CXF 3.1.7 users have to do:

1. Have Swagger2Feature activated to get Swagger JSON returned
2. Add a swagger-ui dependency  to the runtime classpath.
3. Access Swagger UI

For example, run a description_swagger2 demo. After starting a server go to the CXF Services page and you will see:

Click on the link and see a familiar Swagger UI page showing your endpoint's API.

Have you wondered what do some developers mean when they say it is a child's play to try whatever they have done ? You'll find it hard to find a better example of it after trying Swagger UI with CXF 3.1.7 :-)

Note in CXF 3.1.8-SNAPSHOT we have already fixed it to work for Blueprint endpoints in OSGI (with the help from Łukasz Dywicki).  SwaggerUI auto-linking code has also been improved to support some older browsers better.

Besides, CXF 3.1.8 will also offer a proper support for Swagger correctly representing multiple JAX-RS endpoints based on the fix contributed by Andriy and available in Swagger 1.5.10 or when API interface and implementations are available in separate (OSGI) bundles (Łukasz figured out how to make it work).

Before I finish let me return to the description_swagger2 demo. Add a cxf-rt-rs-service-description dependency to pom.xml. Start the server and check the services page:

Of course some users do and will continue working with XML-based services and WADL is the best language available around to describe such services. If you click on a WADL link you will see an XML document returned. WADLGenerator can be configured with an XSLT template reference and if you have a good template you can get UI as good as this Apache Syncope document.

Whatever your data representation preferences are, CXF will get you supported.