Sunday, September 16, 2007

[Tech] XFire and Celtix merge

For several month I developed an application dealing with web services. For this project I discovered XFire, the new generation SOAP framework. Last year the XFire and Celtix communities considered to merge XFire with Celtix which eventually became real! XFire is now Apache CXF (Incubator) focusing on providing an easy to use service framework. Services can deal with a wide range of protocols, such as SOAP, XML/HTTP, RESTful HTTP and some others. The XFire team see this important step as an huge enhancement for current XFire users:
  • JAX-WS Specification compliance
  • Improved HTTP and JMS Transports
  • Spring 2.0 XML support
  • RESTful services support
  • Great WS-* support: WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-Security are all supported
  • Support for JSON
  • SOAP w/ Attachments support
  • Improved APIs and extension points
  • A larger community, which means faster development, and better support
It is recommended to use CXF in future projects, because feature development of XFire will take place in CXF and not in XFire itself. Actual XFire projects can be migrated to CXF by using this guide.

1 comment:

Alexander Schatten said...

I just wanted to add/point out, that currently an interesting stream of new project appeared in the Apache Incubator. There is a group of projcts that is developed by a strongly overlapping team of developers, hence is well integrated and could provide very good enterprise integration infrastructure in the future. I am speaking particularly of: ActiveMQ (Message Broker), Service Mix (ESB), CXF, Camel (EI Patterns), ODE (BPEL Engine).

I believe that this could be a very powerful "team" of projects. I also think that the strategy is quite good not to integrate everything into a fat ESB but provide projects that can be used individually, but are well integrated and can easily used together.

E.g., ActiveMQ "under" Service Mix or ODE and Camel as JBI Service in Service Mix and so on.