Francisco Gonzalez Mario Rincon

 Apache CXF is an open source services framework.  CXF helps you build and develop services using frontend programming APIs, like JAX-WS and JAX-RS.  These services can speak a variety of protocols such as SOAP, XML/HTTP, RESTful HTTP, or CORBA and work over a variety of transports such as HTTP, JMS or JBI.

 JAX-WS Support  Spring Integration  Aegis Databinding  RESTful services  WS-* Support  Apache Licensed

CXF support three major types of services:  SOAP  REST-ful  CORBA

Programming model for application interactions with CXF Three main variations:  JAX-RS (configured with annotations and/or XML)  JAX-WS (configured with annotations and optionally XML)  Simple (limited compared to JAX-WS, but no annotations required)

 HTTP Transport: There is a Servlet transport for those who are deploying into a Servlet container. There is also a standalone HTTP server based on Jetty.  JMS: CXF's JMS transport plug-in uses the Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) to locate and obtain references to the JMS provider that brokers for the JMS destinations.  Local Transport

 CXF includes a "local" transport. This transport allows you to send messages more efficiently inside a JVM. The messages will serialized and piped from one endpoint to another.  The local transport supports URIs of the structure "local://{endpoint_name}" To use the local transport you simply need to set your address to a local URI.

 CXF uses JAXB 2.x as its default databinding.  XMLBeans.  Aegis data binding will turn nearly any Java object into something that can be represented using schema, including Maps, Lists, and unannotated java types.  SourceDataBinding for Source objects.

There are different ways to build RESTful services with CXF.  JAX-RS: CXF has an implementation of JAX-RS. This provides a more standard way to build RESTful services in JAVA.  JAX-WS Provider and Dispatch: It is possible to create RESTful services with the JAX-WS Provider and Dispatch APIs.  HTTP Binding: The HTTP binding provides a flexible way of creating resources and mapping them to operations in your service. Note : HTTP Binding has been deprecated and is likely to be removed from CXF in one of its future releases.

JAX-WS includes many more annotations such as: - customize the operation name, exclude the operation from inclusion in the service, etc - customize a parameter's name, namespace, direction, etc - customize the return value of the web service call

 If you have existing WSDLs for your service or wish to write your WSDL first and then generate classes, CXF has many tools to help you do this.  The WSDL2Java tool will generate a JAX-WS annotated service and server stub from your WSDL. You can run it one of three ways: - The command line - The Maven Plugin - With the WSDL2Java API

 Sometimes you don't want to annotate classes or use the JAX-WS APIs.  CXF includes a Simple Frontend which allows you to take nearly any class and make a service out of it with absolutely no extra work.

The JAX-WS frontend is far more flexible than the Simple frontend. There are only two reasons to select Simple over JAX-WS:  You must avoid the use of Java annotations. JAX-WS requires them, Simple does not.  You want to have the absolutely smallest possible collection of additional dependencies. JAX-WS has more dependencies than Simple.

 WS-Addressing adds message identification and routing information  WS-Policy adds XML encryption and signing  WS-ReliableMessaging adds message acknowledgement and retransmission  WS-SecureConversation enterprise authentication and ongoing exchanges  WS-Security  WS-SecurityPolicy to configure  WS-Trust enterprise authentication and ongoing exchanges

 Very flexible Java web services stack  Most complete REST support  SOAP WS-* support close to the best  Different configuration options adapt to widest range of application scenarios  OSGi support adding even more flexibility  Also the best supported  Great approach for building web services