Christmas releases!

It's Xmas time and here we are with many great releases!

Few hours ago, JBoss Application Server 7.1.0 CR1 has been released: it comes with over 370 jira resolved, numerous management and clustering improvements and the EE6 Full Profile support is feature complete.

Speaking of web services, one of the AS 7.1.0.CR1 updated components is JBossWS 4.0.0.GA, which has been released yesterday and is available for download starting from today.

The first final version of the JBossWS 4 series solves few minor issues over the previously announced and described CR1 version. Have a look at the release notes and documentation for further details!

Finally, I've also released the 1.1.0.GA version of the JBoss JAX-WS Maven Plugin, which basically introduces support for the new JBossWS 4 stacks and fixes an important bug for those leveraging the Maven War Plugin too in their maven project. The artifacts are available as usual on the maven repository.

Definitely a lot of stuff to play with during the Christmas vacations ;-) Enjoy!

Web Services Resource Access specifications are recommendations

After years of work, the Web Services Resource Access specifications have finally been promoted to W3C recommendations! The new WS-RA standards are:

• Web Services Enumeration (WS-Enumeration)
• Web Services Eventing (WS-Eventing)
• Web Services Transfer (WS-Transfer)
• Web Services Metadata Exchange (WS-MetadataExchange)
• Web Services Fragment (WS-Fragment)
• Web Services Event Descriptions (WS-EventDescriptions)
• Web Services SOAP Assertions (WS-SOAPAssertions)

I'd like to congratulate again the working group on this major achievement and thank Red Hat (as one of the members participating the group) for having allowed me to take part in the group and join the discussions that led to the standards definition.

Time to try JBossWS 4.0.0.CR1 !

JBossWS 4.0.0.CR1 has been released at the end of last week and is currently available for download in binary and source distributions. The release covers both Native and Apache CXF integration stacks and comes with a huge number of improvements, new features and fixes compared to the previous 3.4.1 final release. Have a look at the news page and the release notes [1][2] for further details.

The release is mainly meant for JBoss Application Server 7 and has been tested against AS 7.0.0, 7.0.1, 7.0.2 and the current 7.1.0 snapshot. JBoss AS 6 support is still included, but might be removed by the time JBossWS 4.0.0 goes final (hopefully soon).

This is really the right time for giving JBossWS 4 a try before it goes final! Any feedback is welcome and might turn into last minute fixes for major issues, if any ;-)

Meanwhile we're working on passing webservices-related tests of the full JavaEE certification testsuite using JBoss AS 7; JBossWS 4.0.0 final is going to be shipped in the final AS 7.1.0 release.

Upcoming JBoss AS 7 event in Lugano (JUG)

Java User Group Lugano is organizing its 20th meeting at USI on November, 30th 2011. The event will be completely dedicated to JBoss Application Server 7.
I've been proposed to present there and I'm going to have two sessions, introducing JBoss AS 7 and providing some insights on its webservices subsystem.

More details available at http://www.juglugano.ch/events/meeting_20.html .

JBossWS towards JBoss AS 7.1.0

It's not hard to guess, the JBossWS team is currently working on the webservices features for the future JBoss Application Server 7.1.0.

With one of the major focuses being on the webservices part of the full JavaEE 6 certification requirements, we're currently restoring the still missing pieces in the JBossWS - JBoss AS7 integration.
Yesterday's betas of both Native and Apache CXF integration stacks mark another milestone in the afore mentioned process and bring back @WebServiceRef support and some JAXRPC functionalities on AS7.

Have a look at the release notes [1][2] for the more details and feel free to give the betas a try, feedback is welcome as usual!

[1] JBossWS-CXF 4.0.0.Beta5 release notes
[2] JBossWS-Native 4.0.0.Beta2 release notes

Latest Web Services presentations

It's been a week of JBoss / Red Hat web services presentations in the North Italy area.

As mentioned in the previous blog entry, Red Hat has been sponsoring ECOWS 2011, this year's edition of the European Conference on Web Services. I've taken a session in the industry track; the audience seems to have appreciated the Red Hat involvement in the web services area, especially the contribution with the standardization bodies. The slides for my presentation are available online.

Today I've joined the first meeting of the Milan JBoss User Group and presented on the webservices subsystem of JBoss Application Server 7. Take a look at slides and get involved with the JBUG, interesting meetings are being planned for the future.

JBoss at ECOWS 2011

The European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS) is the premier conference series for both researchers and practitioners to discuss the latest advances in the state of the art and practices of Web services and to foster cross-European collaboration and exchange. The 9th edition of the ECOWS series will be held on September 14-16 at the University of Lugano, Switzerland.

JBoss / Red Hat is supporting ECOWS 2011 as silver sponsor.
I'll be attending the conference and presenting on the JBoss involvement in the webservice area.
The agenda for the event covers multiple tracks, including both research and industry interesting talks.

Apache CXF PMC

Just a quick note to say that I've recently been offered to join the Apache CXF PMC and I accepted.
A project management committee (PMC) is a committee of the Apache Software Foundation charged with responsibility for a top level project. The PMC is the vehicle through which decision making power and responsibility for oversight is devolved to developers.
I'm of course proud of taking part to Apache CXF decisions and will do my best. Thanks to Dan and the other members for the trust.

Publishing WS endpoints through AS7 services

JBoss AS 7.0.0 Final has been released and is available to the community, so we're currently working on the 7.1.0 version of the application server, which is coming with many webservices functionalities additions. While most of them will be aim at covering JCP specification requirements (mainly JSR-109 and JSR-101), some management and general use new features are also coming soon.

Recently it's been the turn of JBoss XTS for being integrated in JBoss AS 7.
XTS provides transaction support for web services, implementing WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity specifications. In order for providing such functionalities, XTS needs to start a given number of WS endpoints to take part into the transactions management. According to the JBoss AS 7 design, this is to be achieved using JBoss AS 7 services.

Publishing a WS endpoints on JBoss AS7 was previously directly bound to the processing of a given deployment unit having webservices endpoint implementation classes in it. So the required steps for achieving our goal were:

1. abstracting the endpoint publish process away from the deployment processing; that was possible thanks to the already existing convenient split of JBossWS endpoint publish logic into deployment aspect blocks, completely hidden behind the JBossWS SPI (iow the JBossWS internals do not directly rely on JBoss AS classes)


2. defining a simple API for publishing POJO endpoints given the endpoint class names, classloader and publish address


3. providing a JBoss AS7 implementation for such an API


4. serving that through an AS7 service

We ended up with a solution that might appear pretty much equivalent to the JAX-WS Endpoint.publish(..) API at first sight, except it

• allows for publishing an endpoint to the HTTP server of the currently running JBoss AS 7 instance


• is embedded into a JBoss AS 7 service, allowing efficient, concurrent and perhaps even lazy/on-demand start/stop of endpoints as part of AS7 operations (for instance, the boot)

The XTS integration easily leveraged the new JBossWS feature, installing and setting up dependencies on multiple WS endpoint publisher services.

You can have a look at this by checking out the latest JBoss AS 7 master from github and starting the standalone-xts.xml profile. During the boot, XTS subsystem and its 14 required WS endpoints are concurrently started in something like 2.5s on a my mid-level laptop ;-)
If you're writing your own AS7 component and need publishing a WS POJO endpoints as part of that, consider giving this new feature a try.

JBoss AS 7 webservices features

JBoss Application Server 7 is highly configurable and allows for running different profiles, including one or more subsystems. The optional webservices subsystem is based on JBossWS-CXF 4.x.

JBoss AS7 users can turn on full webservices capabilities by enabling the org.jboss.as.webservices module extension and the webservices subsystem in their standalone.xml / domain.xml descriptors:


<server name="foo" xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:1.0">
    <extensions>
        [...]
        <extension module="org.jboss.as.webservices"/>
        [...]
    </extensions>
    [...]
    <profile>
        [...]
        <subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:webservices:1.0" xmlns:javaee="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:jaxwsconfig="urn:jboss:jbossws-jaxws-config:4.0">
            <wsdl-host>localhost</wsdl-host>
            <modify-wsdl-address>true</modify-wsdl-address>
        </subsystem>
        [...]
    </profile>
    [...]
</server>

On JBoss AS 7 Final, the webservices extension / subsystem is already enabled and available in a separate domain configuration, domain-preview.xml / standalone-preview.xml. Users can run a given server configuration as follows:

./bin/standalone.sh -server-config standalone-preview.xml


Once the webservices capabilities are enabled, basic JAXWS features as well as advanced WS-* functionalities are available.
The JBossWS 4.x documentation covers all the details, including full JAXWS user guide , JAXWS tooling and quick start sections.

Moreover, examples are also provided on advanced topics:

• WS-Addressing usage


• WS-Security / WS-Security Policy usage


• WS-Reliable Messaging / WS-Reliable Messagin policy usage


• SOAP-over-JMS usage

JBossWS @ JBUG München

The JBossWS project is being presented through a talk at JBUG Munich next week (Monday, May 16th).
The presentation is going to be focussed on the recent JBossWS - Apache CXF integration efforts as well as on the future of the project.
More details on the JBUG Munich website.

JBossWS 4.0.0.Beta1 is out!

After months of active development, the first Beta release of JBossWS 4 is finally out!
The main target of JBossWS 4 is in supporting the upcoming JBoss Application Server 7 and contributing to the innovation that's coming with it.
For instance, AS7 comes with a new modular classloading and requires proper isolation between user classes and JBoss implementation details. As a consequence we've gone through a complete review of ws integration classloading details, re-defined the JBossWS public API and really cleaned up a bunch of things all over the WS components. Full documentation is coming with the next beta releases, however a FAQ for WS AS7 usage is already available.

The JBossWS-CXF stack was also moved to including the recent Apache CXF 2.4 release. The integration has been completely reviewed as CXF 2.4 is less bound to Spring, hence allowing JBossWS to avoid most of the tricks that were in place before to support some "non-Spring" scenarios.

Apache CXF 2.4 also includes many new features and improvements in the WS-Security area. Adding this to some additional integration work on @EndpointConfig annotation, we're finally able to support a completely "Spring-free" WS-SecurityPolicy scenario, with signature / encryption / username token based authentication (sources, resources).

Finally, mainly because of the AS 7 improvements, in terms of performance handling ws invocations, the current JBoss AS 7 + JBossWS 4 integration is up to 35% faster then JBoss AS 6 Final + JBossWS 3.4.1.GA

The Beta1 artifacts are available on the JBoss Maven repository, sources can be retrieved from SVN repository as usual.

While JBoss AS 7 is meant to be the primary (and probably only, once we reach final stage) target of JBossWS 4.x, at the moment JBoss AS 6 Final is also supported as target container.
Please note that given the AS7 is currently in very active development phase, JBossWS 4.0.0.Beta1 is fully tested against its current (today, May 11) version only. As soon as JBoss AS 7 will reach CR level, we'll add that release to the released supported target containers list of JBossWS 4.

Please have a look at the first Beta of JBossWS 4, feedback is always welcome!

Stressing WS features of JBoss AS 6 Final

JBoss AS 6.0.0.Final has been released few days ago. It passes the JavaEE 6 Web Profile certification testsuite and that's probably one the most notable achievements of this release. You should really read Dimitris blog on this topic, which gives a wide view of what's new with AS 6, especially if compared to the previous final version, JBoss AS 5.1.

An interesting discussion is currently on on JBoss forum regarding JavaEE 6 Web Profile vs Full Profile... while it's important for users/customer to provide feedback, please note that in terms of web services features, JBossWS-CXF 3.4.1.GA included in JBoss AS 6 Final is already passing the relevant tck modules of the full profile certification.
Moreover, you most probably already know that Apache CXF 2.3.1, which is consumed by JBossWS-CXF 3.4.1, is JAX-WS 2.2 compliant.

So, despite having the EE6 Web Profile stamp only on it, JBoss AS 6 really has all you need for safely leveraging the latest revisions of webservices technologies (JSR-224, JSR-109, etc.).
Moreover, in addition to the standard compliance above, the switch from the Native stack to the Apache CXF based one brings improved WS-* support (try out the WS-Policy support with security, addressing, reliable messaging, etc.) and better performances.

... just the WS contribution to JBoss AS 6 Final actually being more than a certified Java EE6 Web Profile implementation ...