JBossWS 5.3.0.Final is out!

After couple days work, I am proud to announce JBossWS 5.3.0.Final has been released.

This new release brings a lot of component upgrade, issue fix and improvement. Apache CXF is now upgraded to 3.3.1. and JDK11 or higher version is better supported. For more detailed info and full list of issues resolved, please check release notes.

If you have any problem and want to send feedback for this new release, please post at jbossws forum or file issues in JIRA at: https://issues.jboss.org/projects/JBWS

JBossWS 5.2.0.Final is available

After some micro bug fix releases on the 5.1 stream, JBossWS 5.2.0.Final has eventually been released.
The latest versions brings a lot of component upgrades to WildFly, the most relevant ones being Apache CXF 3.2 and JAXB 2.3. Thanks to many other minor improvements and fixes in the stack, the result is that JBossWS 5.2.0.Final is compatible (and has been tested) with the latest final JDK 9.
Please have a look at the release notes for further details and give it a try!

Summer's nearly over..

Summer is nearly over and last time I wrote here was just before last Christmas.. definitely time for an update!

During the first half of this year we've been working on fixing reported bugs of the JBossWS 5.1.x series. There are some plans for kicking off the 5.2 development, but at the moment the focus is still on maintaining the 5.1 series.

Anyway, JBossWS 5.1.3.Final, 5.1.4.Final and 5.1.5.Final has been released and included in WildFly... hey, did you notice that WildFly 10.1.0.Final is out? :-D Go and download it, it's really worth trying it!

As a consequence of 10.1.0.Final having been released, WildFly master has moved to 11 and here we are with a fresh WS piece of news...
JBoss Wise is coming into WildFly! You can read more here, anyway what this basically means is that a GUI for testing WS endpoints is going to be available by default in WildFly soon.
Really nice, isn't it? :-)

Christmas 2015 releases!

Just few hours before the holiday break and here we are with the last releases of the year!
First of all, WildFly 10.0.0.CR5 has been released and will soon turn into Final assuming no major flaw is reported. You can read more on the release at wildfly.org!
Speaking of web services, yesterday I've tagged the second micro release of JBossWS 5.1.x series and today you can download it from jbossws.jboss.org. You might have noticed that we've released two bug fix versions this month: JBossWS 5.1.1.Final was mainly a bug fix release (but of course we also moved to the most recent Apache CXF version), while JBossWS 5.1.2.Final is basically a performance improvement release, cut just in time to include it as a last minute change in WildFly 10 :-)
As usual, have a look at the release notes for a detailed list of changes. The supported target containers for both JBossWS releases are WildFly 9.0.0.Final, 9.0.1.Final and 9.0.2.Final.

The year is almost over, time to relax, give the last WildFly 10 CR a try and then get back fully recharged in 2016 to play with WildFly 10 Final :-)
Greetings!

JBossWS 5.1.0.Final is available!

One month after the beta release, JBossWS 5.1.0 is eventually final!
This time, we have gone for a time-boxed release approach and limited the number of new features on top of previous release. The reason is that we really wanted the upcoming WildFly 10 to include the latest and greatest WS components. As a matter of fact, JBossWS 5.1.0 brings Apache CXF 3.1 series into the WildFly container; the latest Apache CXF versions, in turn, come with few performance improvements that we directly contributed to, while working on optimizing the whole WildFly WS stack.
On top of that and besides for a bunch of bug fixes, an interesting new feature has just been added to JBossWS 5.1, which is support for jboss-webservices.xml descriptor in EAR deployment archives. This allows setting a given behaviour of the stack for all sub-deployments included in an EAR archive packaged application, preventing the user from having to specify the same options in multiple jboss-webservices.xml descriptors.
You can have a look at the release notes for a list of the improvements and fixed issues.

JBossWS 5.1.0.Final is available for direct download and on both the JBoss and Maven Central repositories. The release documentation is here.

The supported target containers are WildFly 8.2.1.Final, WildFly 9.0.0.Final and WildFly 9.0.1.Final... and of course WildFly 10.0.0.CR1 and later will be including it by default already.
Enjoy!

A book on JAX-WS in WildFly and more...

It was last winter when I was offered to author a book on the Web Services stack provided by JBossWS / Apache CXF in WildFly. I eventually took up the challenge and invested part my spare time on writing the book.
To be honest, what really inspired me was the chance of finally being able to write down from scratch how I believe a user should approach the Web Services world and move on from the theory to real world usage scenarios.
As a matter of fact, throughout the years I spent contributing and leading the JBossWS project, I've often had to deal with users picking up concepts and code snippets from books here and there and then asking why they were not achieving what they expected in JBoss AS / WildFly. This opportunity looked like a way to eventually say "look, if you really don't want to read and understand the project documentation, here is a book that likely has all you need and nothing more" ;-)
The goal was probably a bit too ambitious, nevertheless I believe the result of my effort is definitely good.
So, if you want to get your hands on my JAX-WS book, it's currently available in electronic edition at itBuzzpress.com and on Amazon. Printed edition coming soon.

WildFly 9 and JBossWS 5, the future is coming...

After few months of silence, here we are again with some webservices updates. We've been working on next major release of JBossWS the whole spring and summer and few days ago the first Beta of JBossWS 5 has been released to the Maven repository.
So, what's new and great with JBossWS 5 ? The release notes for the first beta can be found on Jira as usual, however let's go through the main changes and improvements.

Apache CXF 3

The most important component upgrade with JBossWS 5 is the move from Apache CXF 2.7.x series to the 3.0.x series, which also pulls updates to Apache WSS4J 2.0.x and Apache Santuario 2.0.x. Apache CXF 3 brings a bunch of new features. The most notable one is probably the addition of WS-Security streaming support: a new StAX based implementation of WS-Security is available as an alternative to the existing DOM based one; the streaming implementation ensures better performances when dealing with large SOAP messages, as less memory is consumed to parse the message headers and the stack can completely avoid the message conversion to DOM if there's no other reason for doing that.
Among the other improvements in Apache CXF 3, a more complete support of WS-RM 1.1 is provided and a new asynchronous http transport is available.

WSDL soap:address rewrite improvements

JBossWS features a mechanism for rewriting the soap:address element in the WSDL that's published for both code-first and contract-first endpoint deployments. This is commonly used to control the endpoint address that's advertised when the actual application server instances are running behind load balancer or proxy hosts. Multiple options are available to define how the address computed by the container has to be tweaked to be a valid address for the user actually invoking the endpoint from outside of the server network. With JBossWS 5, few additional options have been added, like endpoint path rewrite rules (supporting SED scripts) and an attribute to force the address scheme (http or https) regardless of the transport security setup of the server.
Speaking of published WSDL manipulation, system property expansion is now also supported.

Default CXF bus selection strategy change

The concept of Apache CXF bus selection strategy has been introduced in one of the previous posts. With JBossWS 5, the default strategy for JAX-WS clients running in-container (that is in WildFly, perhaps invoked by a EE component like a servlet, EJB3 bean or CDI bean) is now TCCL_BUS. The change is going to ensure better performances, reducing the number of Bus creations and the amount of memory used for them. The reason for such a change stands in the container basically defining a different classloader for each deployment, which is usually the proper level of isolation for JAX-WS client busses. The user can still configure the server to use the previous default behavior.


The new JBossWS 5.0.0.Beta1 components, including the new Apache component dependencies, have been pushed to the current WildFly master. That basically mean that the great upcoming WildFly 9 Beta release is going to ship with the latest webservices stack too. So either wait few days for the new container to be released or deploy the new stack from the tagged jbossws-cxf sources and get back to us with any feedback :-) Some notes on migration from previous versions of JBossWS are also being added here.
We do plan to reach 5.0.0.Final by the time WildFly 9 will reach Final too.

JBossWS 4.3.0.Final is available!

A couple of days ago JBossWS 4.3.0.Final has been released.
The latest minor release of the JBoss Web Services stack improves stability, by preventing concurrency issues and ensuring thread safety whenever required. Besides for that, the embedded Apache libraries have been updated, in particular Apache CXF 2.7.10 and Apache WSS4J 1.6.14 are now included.
Finally, the SOAP Profile of JSR-196 (Java Authentication Service Provider Interface for Containers - JASPIC) is now supported and the JBossWS integration code comes with a predefined server authentication module for relying on credentials coming in a WS-Security UsernameToken.
As usual, multiple bug fixes and testsuite improvements are also part of the release.

The binary and source distributions are available for download and the latest Maven artifacts have been added to the repository.
Speaking of Maven repositories, it's some months now since the JBossWS artifacts are properly mirrored to the Maven Central repository, meaning everybody can use JBossWS even without setting the JBoss Nexus repository in local Maven settings.xml :-)

The supported target containers for this release are JBoss AS 7.2.0.Final and WildFly 8.0.0.Final. Due to the required changes in the JBossWS SPI, the next version of WildFly which will be coming with JBossWS 4.3.0.Final by default will most likely be WildFly 9.  Enjoy!

Controlling Apache CXF Bus creation for JAXWS clients

JBossWS 4.2.2.Final has just been released and installed in current WildFly master.
The new version comes with multiple bug fixes as well as a relevant new feature for controlling the Apache CXF Bus creation whenever JAXWS clients are built.

Basing the JAXWS functionalities of JBoss AS / WildFly on Apache CXF opened up interesting integration topics, one of them being when to create new CXF Bus instances and when / how to share them in the container. With the latest JBossWS integration release, the strategy for selecting/creating Bus instances to serve (in-container) JAXWS client can be chosen by the final user. This allows better control and can also be used for performance tuning. You can read more about the new feature in the documentation.

The release also comes with upgrades to Apache CXF 2.7.7 and Apache Santuario 1.6.12.
It's now time for you to download JBossWS 4.2.2.Final, install it and give it try! Feedback is welcome as usual!

The supported target containers for this release are JBoss AS 7.1.2.Final, JBoss AS 7.1.3.Final and JBoss AS 7.2.0.Final. Of course, next releases of WildFly are also going to include the new WS components.

JBossWS 4.2.0.Beta1 and WS-Discovery support

Just in time for the first release of WildFly, I've cut the first Beta release of JBossWS 4.2 series and had it pulled into the application server.

The latest build includes the additions I provided a preview of in the previous post as well as integration of few new features from Apache CXF. The most notable one is probably the WS-Discovery support, which you can get some preliminary doc on here.
Users can now have ws endpoints from selected deployments be automatically registered in a WS-Discovery service endpoint; that in turn can be queried to locate existing endpoints over the network. Nice, isn't it? :-)

Feel free to give the Beta a try, artifacts are available on the Maven repo as usual. Feedback is welcome, as always!

JBossWS 4.2 feature preview

This blog post is about few additions that are coming with JBossWS 4.2 release which I actually started working on due to some specific Narayana requirements, but ended up using for additional tasks too.

Starting from version 2.1, the JAX-WS API contains the javax.xml.ws.WebServiceFeature abstract class which is used to configure clients, e.g. when getting the port stub. The JAX-WS reference impl, which is also included in the JDK, bundles three implementations of WebServiceFeature for controlling addressing, MTOM and wsdl:extension usage.

As of JBossWS 4.2.0.Alpha1, a custom extension of WebServiceFeature is available, org.jboss.ws.api.configuration.AbstractClientFeature. That offers users and project integrators a way of initializing the client BindingProvider, setting handlers, etc. The JBoss project for distributed webservices transactions, Narayana, actually leveraged this addition to really simplify the way users write clients for WS-AT and WS-BA enabled webservices. Two custom features built on top of AbstractClientFeature let Narayama hide all its context propagation configuration from the user eyes ;-)

Now, as most of you probably know, JBossWS also comes with a notion of predefined client-configuration which can be used to prepare JAX-WS client configuration templates to associate client ports to. Configurations can include properties as well as handlers declaration and are provided either as part of the JBoss AS webservices subsystem configuration (standalone.xml / domain.xml) or as a separate file.
The AbstractClientFeature extension above offered a way for also simplifying a client-configuration setup for a given JAX-WS client; the org.jboss.ws.api.configuration.ClientConfigFeature allows specifying the name of the desired client-configuration as well as the file to read that from (null for reading from the AS model):

Nice, isn't it?
Feel free to try this as well as any other additions on JBossWS trunk, the 4.2.0 final release is coming in the next months. Feedback is welcome!

WS testing... Wise is back!

Wise is an interesting project with the aim of simplifying webservices invocation. One of the possible usecases it enables is quick testing of WS endpoints without the need of generating and compiling client stubs or directly writing SOAP / XML messages.

I've spent some time lately on this topic and finally cut a new release of Wise including a web gui. This runs of top of JBoss AS 7 and is hence based on JBossWS. Consider having a look, to me it's a convenient tool when it's time to test WS services (especially for business quality acceptance) and you don't want to get your hands dirty with code or xml (or you're not expected to do that, perhaps because you're a business quality engineer ;-) )

Wise Web GUI - Invoking a test endpoint

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.