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.