[OT] The best T-shirt I've seen at Apache Con EU 2014

This is the first post about Apache Con EU 2014 held in beautiful Budapest I've been lucky to attend to.

One of the nice things about being an ApacheCon visitor is that one can see lots of cool T-shirts. The official T-shirts (I do treasure them) and other T-shirts with some great lines or digits printed on them. The T-shirts that many software geeks would be happy to wear. And indeed the visitors at ApacheCon EU 2014 had a lot of different T-shirts to demonstrate.

It was at the presentation about TomEE that I realized that while the rest of the room were glued to the presentation screen and being impressed by what TomEE could do I was looking at the T-shirts of TomEE experts doing the presentation and thinking how unfair it was I did not have a T-shirt like that too.

You can see Romain wearing it here.

Tomitribe, the company which did it right once again :-) !

Meet the CXF team at ApacheCon EU

ApacheCon EU will be held next week in Budapest, the nice capital of Hungary, and a number of my Talend and CXF colleagues will be there talking about CXF, Fediz, Syncope.

Please check the schedule.

Apache will be starting celebrating its 15th anniversary at the conference too, it is amazing that the organization is  relatively young, I thought it has been around for much longer given how popular and visible Apache is.

It is going to be exciting though I'm already getting a bit nervous as I usually do when I'm about to present :-).

Here is some information about the presentations I will do.

The first one is called JAX-RS 2.0 with Apache CXF Continued - I did a similar presentation in Denver in April and hence it has a "Continued" in the title but I'd like to confirm it is not a copy and paste of the original presentation, I tried to rework the slides and update the examples. Check the link and see if it can be of interest - I will talk about JAX-RS, JAX-RS 2.0, with plenty of code examples to be shown along the way.

The second one is called From OAuth1 to OAuth2 with Apache CXF and Hawk. I hope people who are interested in OAuth will find the presentation being entertaining enough. Note it will not be about "OAuth2 being not good enough, Hawk is to the rescue till OAuth3 arrives", nothing like that. The presentation will be about the extensibility of OAuth2, while giving the due credit to OAuth1 and indeed Hawk which can serve as a neat bridge for OAuth1 developers wondering if it makes sense to move to OAuth2 or not. The latest OAuth2 Proof-Of-Possession (POP) effort will be briefly described too.

See you at the conference !

JSR-370: Even Better JAX-RS on the way

No doubt JAX-RS 2.0 (JSR-339) has been, is and will be a success - a lot has been written  about the top features JAX-RS 2.0 offers. It is still very much a relevant story for many developers who have their REST services being migrated to JAX-RS 2.0, it is not always easy for a given production to switch to a new specification's API fast.

But JAX-RS 2.0 is not the end of JAX-RS as such. So the fact JSR-370 (JAX-RS 2.1) is now active is a very good news for all of us working with or interested in JAX-RS.
Have a look at the "Request" section and check the list of the improvements and new features that the specification will cover. Good stuff. Note the effort will be made to have JAX-RS applications much better prepared for supporting Web-based UI frontends. Another thing to note is the fact it will be Java 8 based so expect Java 8 features making themselves visible in JAX-RS 2.1 API, Marek and Santiago will come up with some very cool API ideas.

All is great in the JAX-RS space. Explore it and enjoy !

CXF becomes friends with Tika and Lucene

You may have been thinking for a while: would it actually be cool to get some experience with Apache Lucene and Apache Tika and enhance the JAX-RS services you work upon along the way ? Lucene and Tika are those cool projects people are talking about but as it happens there has never been an opportunity to use them in your project...

Apache Lucene is a well known project where its community keeps innovating with improving and optimizing the capabilities of various text analyzers. Apache Tika is a cool project which can be used to get the metadata and content out of binary resources with formats such as PDF, ODT, etc, with lots of other formats being supported. As a side note, Apache Tika is not only a cool project, it is also a very democratic project where everyone is welcomed from the get go - the perfect project to start your Apache career if you think of starting involved into one of the Apache projects.

Now, a number of services you have written may be supporting uploads of the binary resources, for example, you may have a JAX-RS server accepting multipart/form-data uploads.

As it happens, Lucene plus Tika is what one needs to be able to analyze the binary content easily and effectively. Tika would give you the metadata and the content, Lucene will tokenize it and help search over it. As such you can let your users search and download only those PDF or other binary resources which match the search query. It is something your users will appreciate.

CXF 3.1.0 which is under the active development offers a utility support for working with Tika and Lucene. Andriy Redko worked on improving the integration with Lucene and introducing a content extraction support with the help of  Tika. It is all shown in a nice jax_rs/search demo which offers a Bootstrap UI for uploading, searching and downloading of PDF and ODT files. The demo will be shipped in the CXF distribution.  

Please start experimenting today with the demo (download CXF 3.1.0-SNAPSHOT distribution), let us know what you think, and get your JAX-RS project to the next level.

You are also encouraged to experiment with Apache Solr which offers an  advanced search engine on top of Lucene, with Tika also being utilized.

Enjoy!      

[OT] Wake Up To CXF Revolution !

It's the end of the summer, still warm outside, and your friends from the Big Data team have millions of millions of records processed per second with Hadoop and give the happy smiles of those who are doing something new and cool. And you have GET, POST, may be PUT, then again GET. Occasional DELETE and if you are really lucky, you've got PATCH in the logs. You are starting wondering, is it really still cool, be a web service  developer, does anyone care, what is new here ? Apache CXF has been around for so many years. What is next ?

Keeping a project such as Apache CXF alive and healthy for a long time is not an easy task. Dan, the lead, gave a nice presentation about Apache CXF in Denver, about the work we have done to keep CXF relevant and up-to-date. Dan did not mention it during the presentation: Apache CXF dependencies are always up to date, with the project being constantly aligned, optimized and having the workarounds in place should a given underlying module prove too rigid in supporting CXF in doing what it should do. CXF is a well-oiled, fast web services engine thanks to Dan.

This is all good you may say, but what is next ? What revolution am I talking about ? JAX-WS is not evolving, JAX-RS is not exactly new either. You can even say, CXF is old ? Well, the CXF fire is as alive as ever, the revolution is brewing, CXF is going to get to the next level where it will become one of the de-facto choices for writing new, secure, user-centric HTTP services.  The need for such services will only keep growing.

The industry is not sleeping, lots of new exciting technologies are being developed: OAuth2, JOSE, WebCrypto, OpenId-Connect. It's all incredibly cool. It's new. It's only a beginning of the long development life-cycle. Apache CXF wants to be there.

And finally to the [OT] moment: Arcade Fire is fantastic group. Wake Up. Wake Up to the Next CXF Revolution, be part of it, and give your friends that happy smile again ! Tell your grandchildren you were there when it started (LOL while I'm typing it).

Have Fun !

Learn JOSE and become a better Web Service Developer

The work around OAuth2 and JOSE in particular has inspired me.

So much that I've ordered several books from Amazon.co.uk - and it's been quite a while since the idea of buying a book occurred to me; and several books in the age of Google ? - see, it did inspire me.

Sometimes we the developers think that we know all and if not all then we think we won't need that extra piece of knowledge, being the experts we are. The software engineering is not easy. We have the deadlines and our regular work to be well taken care of. No time for reading the books: the more busier and older we become the less time we have.

This is why I like OAuth2 and JOSE. JOSE, specifically, is a very fine effort, it represents a set of nicely aligned specifications tackling the various issues related to signing and encrypting the arbitrary payloads and using simple and effective JSON metadata to describe the signature and encryption operations. It's led by the people who understand what they do. JOSE deals only with the best/most trusted/most understood signature and encryption algorithms. It's a set of 'books' about the latest in the cryptography.

It is already starting and will affect the way we do secure HTTP services. I already claimed it in the earlier post about OAuth2 and repeat it again here.

Learn JOSE, understand it, start using it, become a better engineer !

JAX-RS is not only about REST

I've been planning to post this 'philosophical' piece for a while.

The JAX-RS specification (Java API for RESTful services) has really got off the ground long time ago. JAX-RS 2.0 with its new brilliant features, with three JAX-RS 2.0 frameworks around (there will possibly be more, we never know), is and will further contribute to the popularity of JAX-RS.

JAX-RS 2.1 work will go ahead  soon enough and it will be another great specification, I've no doubt the spec leads will take care of making that happen, same way they did for 2.0  :-).

The central line of this blog though is that JAX-RS is actually not only about REST. It may sound like a shock to some people but the beauty of this specification is that it has completely re-opened the HTTP web service development space and will continue doing so for quite a few more years to come.

It's an important fact: developers always want to do something new, even though it's a fact that existing Web service technologies has proven to be able to deliver: many many people have written SOAP endpoints that work, many many people have designed endpoints according to REST style, the WEB rules. But REST is not the end of the web services road, it is only a set of proven rules.

We all know many JAX-RS endpoints are not necessarily that RESTful, in a a nutshell they support simple HTTP endpoints, often with 2 HTTP verbs only max - and it is absolutely OK: JAX-RS does and will help no matter how far one would like to go in their HTTP endpoint design.