Before joining Red Hat / JBoss, I used to have closing balance face to face meetings at work before Christmas. Of course I met with my direct boss… so now I find quite funny to think about writing something similar to a JBossWS 2010 closing balance here, given my boss at that time now happens to be the guy I share this blog with and since some months he’s finally working for Red Hat / JBoss too – Stefano

So, what’s up with JBossWS in 2010 ? The project has gone through two major sets of releases. The 3.3.x series kind of finalized the JBossWS move to having the Apache CXF based stack as its preferred one, installed by default on JBoss Application server. Integrating a third-party piece of software is always something non-trivial. And even if the overall quality of what we consume (and contribute to, of course) from Apache is definitely very high, that’s simply not enough when it comes to integrating: many issues were discovered, dealt with and solved… any many are probably still to come.

The type of development you end up doing when providing a solution like JBossWS-CXF is pretty much different from what you are on when developing stuff from scratch. I kind of expected that to be honest. It’s not that unusual to spend days on looking for the best way of re-using / integrating already existing (or partially available) functionalities, trying to figure out an elegant solution for achieving the goal on JBoss side, while enriching the third-party side of the software in a way that makes sense regardless of JBoss needs. Sometime I think it’s like “plumbing”. For sure you need to go on constantly swapping your hats, the JBoss employee one and the Apache contributor one, in my case. And given we operate in an open source world here … you might even find yourself producing fully vendor agnostic solutions just for the sake of solving your own (JBoss here) problem.

Some might dislike this kind of work, thinking satisfaction can come only from creating your own solutions from scratch, feeling they’re your own babies. Others might appreciate the integration work, enjoying the  new challenges in this. To be honest, I think this is a really subjective feeling and you can find yourself excited by the achievements you reach in both cases. You should probably try both in any case.

Anyway, back to bringing Apache CXF in JBoss through JBossWS… implementing the JSR 109 requirements is a good example of integration. Apache CXF provides WS functionalities and successfully verifies those are compliant with the core JCP WS specifications (JSR 224 – JAXWS, for instance). However CXF of course does not care about all the details on how that’s supposed to work with a given application server according to the rest of the JavaEE specification, which JSR 109 is a good example of. In an ideal world the missing bits need to live in the integration project (JBossWS here)… In reality you end up coordinating different needs, reviewing and rationalizing stuff on both sides, to basically make the integration happen and be a success.

The second set of JBossWS 2010 releases has been the 3.4.x series. While the announcement is recent story, that was a multiple months effort from me and the rest of the team. We went through active collaboration on CXF (Apache contributor hat on ) to have it implement JAXWS 2.2 and make it pass the TCK certifaction testsuite for that. While on that, we implemented the proper integration for passing the corresponding ws modules of JavaEE 6 TCK on JBoss side (with *the* red hat on ). This all was done while directly targeting development snapshots of Apache CXF, hence with multiple moving targets (JBoss AS, Apache CXF, our own JBossWS integration layer and even the TCK which was not final yet) to track for potential regressions.

At the end of the year I’m quite satisfied by what we got. From a job point of view, I’m just waiting for Santa to come with a nice present… a final release of JBoss AS 6 (I sent him the jbossws maven artifacts to include in the box , he should have got them in time… despite the snow over north Italy these days).

OK, now it’s time to start relaxing a bit, to enjoy the Christmas spirit…  then I’ll come back with new intentions for the next year, both directly related to JBossWS and not…

Merry X-mas and happy new year!

I’ve just pubblished a post on the JBosWS blog regarding the JBossWS involvement in the Apache CXF project. In few words, the JBossWS team is increasing its collaboration with the CXF developers, the target being to improve both projects.

It’s not that simple to achieve an active bi-directional collaboration, with both parties’ needs being considered, but this is working quite well now. For instance, read what Daniel Kulp (CXF lead) writes about the collaboration. Needless to say I like this, that’s a nice example of what open source can make possible.