On April 16th 2008, Apache CXF graduated from the Apache incubator and officially became a top level project. At that time, CXF was mostly just a “soap stack”, although it did have a few additional bindings, such as as CORBA binding thanks to the contributions from IONA/Progress. Since then, the scope has expanded quite a bit. Top notch REST/JAX-RS support was added. Several new security specs were implemented. New services were added to CXF that uses the base framework. Things like WS-Discovery, a full STS, WS-Notification, and an XKMS implementation were added. The REST/JAX-RS implementation was enhanced to support several different API specs (wadl, swagger 2, openapi, etc…), various search providers, several types of “reactive” integrations, etc… We’ve recently received contributions to implement the MicroProfile client API’s.
Two sub-projects are now part of CXF as well. DOSGi is an implementation of the Distributed OSGi spec. Fediz is a security framework to implement WS-Federation Passive Requestor Profile and other specs to help secure your web application.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve done over 200 releases. We have 43 committers, 25 of which are PMC members. Many “mature” projects such as CXF have had to start thinking about entering the attic. Keeping a high level of involvement and forward progress for 10 years is not easy. CXF continues to receive new ideas, new features, fixes, etc… very often, constantly providing new releases for users to use. Part of this is due to the high level of adoption of CXF. Many companies rely on CXF for their WebService and REST needs. Companies like Talend, RedHat, WSO2, IBM, Savoir Technologies, Tomitribe, etc… rely heavily on CXF. Their users need CXF to “just work” as well as keep up with new technologies, specs, and features. Several of these companies pay some of their employees to contribute and support CXF. Tons of thanks go out to those companies for helping make CXF the success that it has become.
It’s been an exciting 10 years and I look forward to seeing what the future reveals.