[OT] Work Next Year the way Arsenal and Liverpool played their football

I've been lacking the ideas on how to write the regular and last off-topic post of the year, thinking which piece of music I should link to.

And then the inspiration came from the completely unexpected source.

Those of you who follow Arsenal FC in the English Premier League know that Arsenal can either draw against Liverpool but in such a way that fans will remember it for years (yes, that Liverpool 4 to Arsenal 4 draw), or, most likely, lose badly to this Merseyside team, something like 1:4 or similar.

So less than a week earlier, Arsenal was playing with Liverpool in London, losing 0:2. Oh well, most Arsenal fans thought, one of those days which can only be described in Fever Pitch. Then, in the 2nd half, after the few minutes, while the fans were having mince pies and tea,  Arsenal were 3:2 up, with Liverpool managing to equalize. The game saw many mistakes and brilliant moves and fans just had the day of the year watching the game. I liked this summary.

How would I translate that to a New Year wish for you, the software engineers ? Here it is:

Enjoy your work next year, try to do something extraordinary, something new, and don't be afraid to make mistakes :-)

Happy New Year !

Get OpenAPI v3 JSON with CXF Now !

The Apache CXF has done some initial work to have OpenAPI v3 JSON reported from the JAX-RS endpoints.

Andriy Redko has started with the OpenApiFeature implementation which depends on the latest OpenApi v3 aware swagger-core and swagger-jaxrs libraries and demoed it here.

In meantime I did a Swagger2 to OpenApi v3 JSON conversion filter which reacts to openapi.json queries by converting Swagger2 swagger.json produced by Swagger2Feature to openapi.json with the idea of making it easier for the existing upstream code (which has already integrated Swagger2Feature) to start experimenting with OpenAPI v3, before doing the switch to the new feature (and dependencies).  

This effort is still a work in progress but the results in both cases are promising. The new feature and the conversion filter will require some more improvements but you can start experimenting with them right now. And if you are someone like me then you will be positively surprised that SwaggerUI  3.6.1 and newer can handle both Swagger2 and OpenAPI v3 JSON :-).

Enjoy !

Simple Reuse of org.reactivestreams in CXF

I mentioned earlier that one could link RxJava2 Flowable with JAX-RS AsyncResponse with Subscriber which will do the best effort at streaming the data pieces converted to JSON array elements, see this example.

That works but requires the application code refer to both JAX-RS AsyncResponse and CXF specific JsonStreamingAsyncSubscriber (RxJava2 specific at the earlier stage), as opposed to simply returning Flowable from the resource method.

In meantime, John Ament added the initial Reactor integration code, and as part of this work John also provided the org.reactivestreams compatible JsonStreamingAsyncSubscriber to be optionally used with the CXF Reactor invoker.

As a result we've found the opportunity to do some refactoring and introduce the simple org.reactivestreams utility module which is now reused between CXF RxJava2 invoker and Reactor invoker: the common invoker code both invokers delegate to will check if JSON is expected and if yes then will register JsonStreamingAsyncSubscriber as org.reactivestreams.Subscriber with org.reactivestreams.Publisher which can be either RxJava2 Flowable or Reactor Flux.

The end result is that users can now write simpler code by returning Flowable or Flux from the service methods.

It is an interesting but simple example of reusing the org.reactivestreams aware code between different org.reactivestreams implementations.