Apache CXF - Web Services Tutorial

Apache CXF is an open-source, fully featured Web services framework. It originated as the combination of two open-source projects: Celtix developed by IONA Technologies (acquired by Progress Software in 2008) and XFire developed by a team hosted at Codehaus. These two projects were combined by people working together at the Apache Software Foundation and the new name CXF was derived by combining "Celtix" and "XFire".

The CXF key design considerations include:

• Clean separation of front-ends, like JAX-WS, from the core code.
• Simplicity with, for instance, the creation of clients and endpoints without annotations.
• High performance with minimum computational overhead.
• Embeddable Web service component: example embeddings include Spring Framework and Geronimo.

CXF is often used with Apache ServiceMix, Apache Camel and Apache ActiveMQ in service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure projects.

Features

CXF includes a broad feature set, but it is primarily focused on the following areas:

• Web Services Standards Support:
  • SOAP
  • WS-Addressing
  • WS-Policy
  • WS-ReliableMessaging
  • WS-SecureConversation
  • WS-Security
  • WS-SecurityPolicy
• JAX-WS API for Web service development
  • Java-first support
  • WSDL-first tooling
• JAX-RS (JSR 339 2.0) API for RESTful Web service development
• JavaScript programming model for service and client development
• Maven tooling
• CORBA support
• HTTP, JMS and WebSocket transport layers
• Embeddable Deployment:
  • ServiceMix or other JBI containers
  • Geronimo or other Java EE containers
  • Tomcat or other servlet containers
  • OSGi
• Reference OSGi Remote Services implementation

Commercial support

Enterprise support for CXF is available from independent vendors, including Red Hat, JBoss, Talend, and Sosnoski Software Associates. See the CXF Support Page for details on all support options.