This morning, I sent out an announcement that Apache CXF 2.5.0 is now released! Over 6 months of work went into this release to expand the feature set, stabilize it, and get it ready for release.
There are two major categories of new “stuff” in this release:
- Normal “framework” features. These features expand the capabilities of CXF as a Services Framework and are more in line with the traditional CXF enhancements. In 2.5.0, these include things like:
- Enhanced WS-RM interopability
- WS-MetadataExchange support
- OAuth support
- Enhanced security options for REST
- Enhanced JMX instrumentation
- Enhanced OSGi and Karaf integration
- New “Services”. This is a brand new area for CXF. With 2.5.0, the scope of CXF now expands to include some enterprise level services that are related to CXF. At this point, they include:
- Security Token Service
- WS-Notification Service
I’m very excited about the second category of enhancements. Traditionally, CXF has always been “just a framework” that can be used to build your services. CXF never really provided any services “out of the box”. I’m hoping that by providing some enterprise level services out of the box, it will become even easier for people to develop and deploy CXF based applications in their enterprise. Both of the new services, while “new” for CXF, are really enterprise ready. The WS-Notification Service is a port (mostly done by Guillaume Nodet) of the ServiceMix WS-Notification service which has been deployed and used in production in many places. By removing the JBI dependencies and re-writing the communications to use pure JAX-WS API’s, the WS-Notification service is now much more usable by a wider audience. The STS was developed by Talend for some of our customers and has been deployed into production. Colm has done an amazing job with the STS to get it to meet a wide range of requirements. Definitely check out his blog for more information about the capabilities of the STS.
Anyway, this is another big release for Apache CXF. Definitely give it a spin and let us know how we’re doing!