Apache CXF: Where it's Been and What the Future Holds for Web Services Frameworks

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on IONA Apache CXF and open-source Web services frameworks.

Listen to the podcast. Sponsor: IONA Technologies

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, a sponsored podcast discussion about Apache CXF, an open-source Web services framework that recently emerged from incubation into a full project. We are going to be discussing where CXF is, what are the next steps, how it is being used, what the market is accepting from open-source Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure, and then, lastly, a road map of where CXF might be headed next.

Joining us to help us understand more about CXF, is Dan Kulp, a principal engineer who has been deeply involved with CXF for a number of years. He works at IONA Technologies. Welcome back to the show, Dan.

Dan Kulp: Thank you, it's good to be here.

Gardner: We are also joined by Raven Zachary, the open-source research director at The 451 Group. Welcome to the show, Raven.

Raven Zachary: Thank you.

Gardner: And we are joined by Benson Margulies, the CTO of Basis Technology. Welcome, Benson.

Benson Margulies: Thank you, good day.

Gardner: Let's start with you, Benson. Tell us a little bit about Basis Technology. I want to hear more about your company, because I understand you are a CXF user.

Margulies: Basis is about a 50-person company in what we call linguistic technologies. We build software components that do things like make high-quality, full-text search possible in languages such as Arabic and Chinese -- or do things like tag names and text, which is part of information retrieval.

We have customers in the commercial and government spaces and we wound up getting interested in CXF for two different reasons. One is that some of our customers have been asking us over time to provide some of our components for integration into a SOA, rather than through a direct application programming interface (API), or some sort of chewing gum and baling wire approach. So, we were looking for a friendly framework for this purpose, and CXF proved to be such.

The other reason is that, for our own internal purposes, we had developed a code generator that could read a Web-service description file WSDL and produce a client for that in JavaScript that could be loaded into a browser and tied back to a Web service. Having built it, we suddenly felt that we would like some help maintaining it. We went looking for an open-source framework to which we could contribute it, and CXF proved to be a friendly place for that too.

Over a period of time, to make a long story short, I wound up as a CXF committer. So, Basis is now both a corporate user of CXF as a delivery vehicle for our product, and also I am a committer focused on this JavaScript stuff.

Gardner: Great. You used the word "friendly" a couple of times. Let's go to Raven Zachary. Raven, why do people who go to open-source code and projects view it as friendly? What's this "friendly" business?

Zachary: Well, there are different motivations for participating in an open-source community. Generally, when you look at why businesses participate, they have a common problem among a peer set. It could be an underlying technology that they don't consider strategic. There are benefits and strength in numbers here, where companies pool together resources to work together on a common problem.

I think that for individual developers, they see it as a chance to do creative problem-solving in off hours, being involved in the team project. Maybe they want to build up their current opportunities of expertise in another area.

In the case of a CXF, it certainly has been driven heavily by IONA and its acquisition of LogicBlaze, but you had other individuals and companies involved -- Red Hat, BEA, folks from Amazon and IBM, and Benson from Basis, who is here talking about his participation. The value of this opportunity for many different commercial entities is coming together to solve a common set of problems.

Gardner: Let's go to Dan Kulp. Dan, tell us a little bit about CXF and its current iteration. You emerged from incubation not that long ago. Why don't you give our listeners, for those who are not familiar with it, a little bit of the lineage, the history of how CXF came together, and a little bit about the current state of affairs in terms of its Apache condition or position?

Kulp: CXF was basically a merger of the Celtix project that we had at ObjectWeb, which was IONA sponsored. We had lot of IONA engineers producing a framework there. There was also the XFire Project that was at Codehaus. Both of these projects were thinking about doing a 2.0 version, and there was a lot of overlap between the two. So, there was a decision between the two communities to pool the resources and produce a better 2.0 version of both XFire and Celtix

As part of that whole process of merging the communities, we decided to take it to Apache and work with the Apache communities as a well-respected open-source community.

So that's the long-term history of CXF. We spent about 20 months in the incubator at Apache. The incubator is where all the new projects come in. There are a couple of main points there, and one is the legal vetting of the code. Apache has very strong requirements about making sure all of the code is properly licensed, but is compatible with the Apache license, that the people that are contributing it to have done all of the legal requirements to make sure that the code meets those things. That's to protect the users of the Apache projects, which, from a company and user standpoint, is very important.

A lot of other projects don't do that type of legal requirement. So, there are always iffy statements around that. That was one important thing. Another very important part of the Apache incubator is building the community. One of the things they like to make sure is that any project that goes out of the incubator is in a very diverse community.

There are people representing a wide range of companies with a wide range of requirements, and the idea is to make sure that that community is long-term stable. If one company should suddenly be acquired by another company, just goes bankrupt and out of business, or whatever, the community is going to still be there in a healthy state. This is so that you can know that that the Apache project is a long-term thing not a short term.

Gardner: Could I pause there, and could you tell us who are the major contributors involved with CXF at this point?

Kulp: IONA is still heavily involved, as is Basis Technology, a couple of IBMers, as was mentioned earlier, and a couple of Red Hat people. There is one person who is now working for eBay who is contributing things, and there are a few people who I don't even know what company they work for. And that's a good thing. I don't really need to know. They have a lot of very good ideas, they are doing a lot of great work, and that's what's important about the community. It's not really that important, as long as the people are there participating.

Gardner: Okay. Things move quickly in this business. I wonder if any of our panelists recognize any shifts in the marketplace that have changed what may have been the optimum requirement set for a fully open-source Web-services framework from, say, two or three years ago, when these projects came together. What has shifted in the market? Does anyone have some thoughts on that?

Margulies: Well, Dan and Glen, who was another one of our contributors, and I, were having a lunch today and we were discussing the shift in the direction from old JAX-RPC framework to JAX-WS/JAXB, the current generation of SOA standards. That has very much become the driving factor behind the kits.

CXF gets a lot of attention, because it is a full open-source framework, which is completely committed to those standards and gives easy-to-use, relatively speaking, support for them and, as in many other areas, focuses on what the people in the outside world seem to want to use the kit for, as opposed to some particular theoretical idea than any of ours about what they ought to want to use it for.

Gardner: Thank you, Benson. Anyone else?

Kulp: Yes, one of the big things that comes to mind when this question comes up is, is the whole "code first" mentality. Several years ago, in order to do Web services, you had to know a lot of stuff about WSDL, extensible markup language (XML) schema. You had to know a lot of XMLisms. When you started talking about interop with other Web Services stacks, it was really a big deal, because these toolkits exposed all of this raw stuff to you.

Apache CXF has is a fairly different approach of making the code-first aspect a primary thing that you can think about. So, a lot of these more junior level developers can pick up and start working with Web services very quickly and very easily, without having to learn a lot of these more technical details.

Gardner: Now, SOA is a concept, a methodology, and an approach to computing, but there are a number of different infrastructure components that come together in various flexible ways, depending on the end user's concepts and direction. Tell us a little bit about how CXF fits into this, Dan, within other SOA infrastructure projects, like ServiceMix, Camel, ActiveMQ. Give us the larger SOA view, the role CXF plays in that. Then, I am going to ask you how that relates to IONA and FUSE?

Kulp: Obviously, nowadays, if you are doing any type of SOA stuff, you really need some sort of Web-service stack. There are applications written for ServiceMix and JBI that don't do any type of SOAP calls or anything like that, but those are becoming fewer and farther between. Part of what our Web services bring is the ability to go outside of your little container and talk to other services that are available, or even within your company or maybe with a business partner or something like that.

A lot of these projects, like Camel and ServiceMix, require some sort of Web-services stack, and they've basically come to CXF as a very easy-to-use and very embeddable service stack that they are using to meet their Web-services needs.

Gardner: Alright, so it fits into other Apache projects and code infrastructure bases, but as you say "plug-in-able," this probably makes it quite relevant and interesting for a lot of other users where Web-services stack is required. Can you name a couple of likely scenarios for that?

Kulp: It's actually kind of fascinating, and one of the neatest things about working in an open-source project is seeing where it pops up. Obviously, with open-source people, anybody can just kind of grab it and start using it without really telling you, "Hey, I'm using this," until suddenly they come to you one day saying, "Hey, isn't this neat?"

One of the examples of that is Groovy Web service. Groovy is another dynamic language built in Java that allows you to do dynamic things. I'm not a big Groovy user, but they actually had some requirements to be able to use Groovy to talk to some Web services, and they immediately started working with CXF.

They liked what they saw, and they hit a few bugs, which was expected, but they contributed back to CXF community. I kept getting bug reports from people, but was wondering what they were doing. It turns out that Groovy's Web-services stack is now based on CXF. That's type of thing is very fascinating from my standpoint, just to see that that type of stuff developed.

Margulies: I should point out that there has been a tendency in some of the older Web-service platforms to make the platform into a rather heavy monolithic item. There's a presumption that what you do for a living with a Web service is stand up a service on the Web in one place. One of CXF's advantages is what you want to do is deliver to some third party a stack that they put up containing your stuff that interacts with all of their existing stuff in a nice light-weight fashion. CXF is un-intrusive in that regard.

Gardner: And, just as a level-set reality check, over to Raven. Tell me a little bit about how this mix-and-match thing is working among and between the third parties, but also among and between commercial and open source, the infrastructure components.

Zachary: The whole Apache model is mix and match, when you are talking about not only a licensing scheme. The Apache license, is a little easier for commercial vendors to digest, modify, and add in, compared to the GPL, but also I think it's the inherent nature of the underlying infrastructure technologies.

When you deploy an application, especially using open source, it tends to be several dozen distinct components that are being deployed. This is especially true in Java apps, where you have a lot of components or frameworks that are bundled into an application. So, you would certainly see CXF being deployed alongside of other technologies to make that work. Things like ServiceMix or Camel, as you mentioned, ActiveMQ, Tomcat, certainly Apache Web Server, these sorts of technologies, are the instrument to which these services are exposed.

Gardner: Now, let's juxtapose this to the FUSE set. This is a commercially supported, certified, and tested SOA and Web-services component set. The FUSE services framework is derived from CXF. Dan, tell us a little bit about what is going on with FUSE and how has that now benefited from CXF moving from incubation into full Apache?

Kulp: As you mentioned, the FUSE services framework is basically a re-branded version of Apache CXF. If you go into a lot of these big customers, like banks or any of the major type of customers, and they deploy an application, they want to have some level of support agreement with somebody that says if a bug is found or a problem crops up, can they get somebody on the phone and get a bug fixed relatively quickly.

That's what the FUSE product line is basically all about. It's all open-source, and anybody can download and use the stuff, but you may not get the same level of support from the Apache community, as you do with the FUSE product.

The Apache communities are pretty much all volunteer-type people. Pretty much everybody is working on whatever their own agenda is, but they have their own expertise. So, they may not even have time, and they may be out on leave or on vacation or something like that. Getting the commercial-level of support from the Apache community can sometimes be a hard sell for a lot of these corporations, and that's why what FUSE really brings is a support agreement. You know that there is somebody there to call when there is a problem.

It's a two-way relationship. Obviously, if any of those customers come back with bugs and stuff, the IONA people will fix them and get them pushed into both Apache and FUSE. So, the bugs and stuff get fixed, but the other thing that IONA gets from this is that there's a lot of ideas in the Apache communities that we may not have thought of ourselves.

One good example of this is that JavaScript thing that Benson mentioned earlier. That's not something IONA really would have thought of at the beginning, but this is something that we can give back to our customers saying, "Hey, isn't this a neat idea?" So, there are a lot of benefits coming from the other people that aren't IONA in these communities actually providing new features and new ideas for the IONA customers.

Gardner: Okay, you came off incubation in April, is that correct?

Kulp: Yes.

Gardner: Tell us about what's going on now. What's the next step, now that it's out of that. Is this sort of a maintenance period, and when will we start to think about seeing additional requirements and functionality coming in?

Kulp: There are two parts to that question. Raven and I graduated, and we were ready to push out 2.1. Apache CXF 2.1 was released about a week after we graduated, and it brought forth a whole bunch of new functionality. The JavaScript was one of them. A whole new tooling was another thing, also CORBA binding, and there is a whole bunch of new stuff, some REST-based APIs. So, 2.1 was a major step forward, compared to the 2.0 version that was ready last August, I believe.

Right now, there are basically two tracks of stuff going on. There are obviously a lot of bug fixes. One of the things about graduating is that there are a lot of people who don't really understand what the incubator is about, and so they weren't looking in the incubator.

The incubator has nothing to do with the quality of the code. It has more to do with the state of the community, but people see the word "incubator" and just say, "No, I'm not going to touch that." But, now that they we're graduated, there are a lot more people looking at it, which is good. We're getting a lot more input from users. There are a lot of people submitting other ideas. So, there is a certain track of people just trying to get some bug fixes and getting some support in place for those other people.

Gardner: I am impressed that you say "bug fixes" and not "refinement." That's very upfront of you.

Kulp: Well, a lot of it is refinement too, and, to be honest, there is a bit of documentation refinement that is going on as well, because with new people using it, there are new expectations. Their old toolkits may have done things one way, and the documentation may not reflect well enough, "Okay, if you did it this way in the old toolkit, this is how you do the same thing in CXF."

Margulies: If I could pipe up with a sociological issue here with open source which says, it's a lot easier to motivate someone to run in and diagnose a defect or a missing feature in the code and make the fix than to get the additional motivation to go over to the "doc" side and think through, "How the heck are we going to explain this, and who needs to have it explained to them." We're really lucky, in fact. We have at least one person in the community who almost entirely focuses on improving the doc as opposed to the code.

Gardner: Okay. So, we're into this maturity move. We've got a lot more people poking at it and using it. We're going to benefit from that community involvement. We've mentioned a couple of things that struck me a little earlier -- the Groovy experience and JavaScript. I guess there's this perception by many whom I've talked to that Web services is interesting, but there's a certain interest level too in moving into more dynamic languages, the use of RESTful for getting out to clients, and thinking about Web services in a broader context.

So, first let's go to Benson. Tell us why this JavaScript element was important to you and where you think the kind of mindset is in the field around Web services and traditional Web services-star specifications and standards?

Margulies: We went here originally, because while we built these components to go into the middle of things, we have to show them off to people, who just want to see the naked functionality. So, we built a certain amount of demo functionality as Web applications, with things from Web pages. And, the whole staff was saying, "Oh gosh, first we have to write a JSP page, and then we have to write some Beans, and then we have to package it all up, and then we have to deploy it."

It got really tiresome. So we went looking for a much thinner technology for taking our core functionality and making it visible. It dawned on us that perhaps you could just call a Web service from a browser.

Historically, there's been such a mentality in the broad community because you "couldn't possibly do that." "Those Web service, XML messages, they are so complicated." "Oh, we could never do that." And, several of the dynamic languages, SOAP, or Web-service kits that have shown up from time to time in the community were really weak. They barely worked, because they're very old versions of the Web-service universe. As Web-service standards have moved into stronger XML, they got left behind.

So, not knowing any better, we went ahead and built a code generator for JavaScript that could actually talk to a JAX-WS Web service, and I think that's an important direction for things to go. REST is a great thing. It allows very simple clients to get some data in and out of Web services, but, people are building really big complicated applications and dynamic languages these days, things like Ruby. For Web services to succeed in that environment, we need more of what we just did with the JavaScript. We need first class citizenship for dynamic languages as clients and even servers of Web services.

Gardner: Let's take it over to Raven. Tell us, from the analyst perspective, what you see going on mentality wise and mindshare wise with Web-services specs, and do you think that there's a sort of "match made in heaven" here between something like CXF and some of these dynamic languages?

Zachary: Well, looking back on the history of CXF being the merging of two initiatives -- Celtix from IONA and XFire from Codehaus -- and spending last few years in the incubator, and now coming out of the incubator in April, bringing together those two initiatives is very telling in terms of the stronger initiative, based on the basis of two existing open-source initiatives.

I like the fact that in CXF they are looking at a variety of protocols. It's not just one implementation of Web services. There's SOAP, REST, CORBA, other technologies, and then a number of transports, not just HTTP. The fact is that when you talk to enterprises, there's not a one-size-fits-all implementation for Web services. You need to really look at services, exposing them through a variety of technologies.

I like that approach. It really matches the needs of a larger variety of enterprise organizations and just it's a specific technology implementation of Web services. I mean, that's the approach that you're going to see from open-source projects in the space. The ones that provide the greatest diversity of protocols and transports are going to do quite well.

Gardner: Dan, you've probably heard this. Some of the folks who are doing more development with dynamic languages and who are trying to move toward light-weight webby applications have kind of an attitude going on with Web-services specs. Have you noticed that and what do you think is up with that? Has that perhaps prevented some of them from looking at CXF in evaluating it?

Kulp: Yeah, in a way, it has prevented them, but Web Services are pretty much everywhere now. So, even though they may not really agree with some of Web-service ideas, for their own user base to be able to grow, they have to start thinking about how do we solve that problem, because the fact is that they are there.

Now, going forward, REST is obviously a big word. So, whatever toolkit you're looking at you need to be able to talk REST as well, and CXF is doing a little bit there. If you go back, there's CORBA stuff that needs to be talked to. With CXF, you don't just get the SOAP part of SOA, you get some of these additional technologies that can help you solve a wider range of problems. That's very important to certain people, especially if you're trying to grow a user base.

Gardner: Alright, so you've obviously benefited, the community has benefited from Benson and Basis Technology offering in what they did with JavaScript. I assume you'll be interested in committers to further that across more languages and more technologies?

Kulp: Oh, definitely. One of the nicest things about working in Apache projects is that it's an ongoing effort to try to keep the community growing and getting new ideas. As you get more people in, they have different viewpoints, different experiences, and all that can contribute to producing new ideas and new technologies, and making it easier to solve a different set of problems.

I always encourage people that, if they're looking in the CXF code, and they hit a bug, it's great if we see them submit a patch for that, because that shows that they're actually digging in there. Eventually, they may say, "Okay, I kind of like how you did that, but wouldn't it be neat if you could just do this?" And then maybe they submit some ideas around that and become a committer. It's always a great thing to see that go forward.

Gardner: Let's go around the table one last time and try to predict the future when it comes to open-source Apache projects, this webby application environment, and the larger undertaking of SOA. Dan, any prophecies about what we might expect in the CXF community over, say, the next 12 months?

Kulp: Obviously, there's going to be this ongoing track of refinements and fixes. One of nice things of the CXF community is that we're very committed to supporting our existing users and making sure that any bug fixes or bugs that they encounter get fixed in a relatively timely manner. CFX has a very good history of doing very frequent patch releases to get fixes out there. So, that's an ongoing thing that should remain in place and it's a benefit to the communities and to the users.

Beyond that, there's a whole bunch of other ideas that we're working on and fleshing out. The code first stuff that I mentioned earlier, we have a bunch of other ideas about how to make code-first even better.

There are certain tool kits that you kind of have to delve down into either configuration or WSDL documents to accomplish what you want. It would be nice if you could just embed some annotations on your code, or something like that, to accomplish some of that stuff. We're going to be moving some of those ideas forward.

There's also a whole bunch of Web-services standards such as WS-I and WS-SecureConversation that we don't support today, but we are going to be working on to make sure that they are supported. As customers or users start demanding other WS technologies, we'll start considering them, as well. Obviously, if new people come along, they'll have other great ideas, and we would welcome those as well.

Gardner: Alright. Raven Zachary, what do you see as some of the trends that we should expect in Open Source infrastructure particularly around SOA and Web services interoperability over, say, the next 12 months?

Zachary: We've had for the last decade or so a number of very successful open-source infrastructure initiatives. Certainly, Apache Web Server Linux as an operating system and the application middleware stack -- Tomcat, Geronimo, JBoss -- have done very well. Open source has been a great opportunity for these technologies to advance, and we're still going to see commercial innovation in the space. But, I think the majority of the software infrastructure will be based on open standards and open source over time and then you'll see commercialization occur around the services side for that.

We're just starting to see the emergence of open-source Web services to a large extent and I think you're going to see projects coming out of the Apache Software Foundation leading that charge as other areas of the software infrastructure have been filled out.

When you look at growth opportunities, back in 2001, JBoss app server was a single-digit market share, compared to the leading technologies at the time, WebSphere from IBM and WebLogic from BEA. In the course of four years, that technology went from single-digit market share to actually being the number one deployed Java app server in the market. I think it doesn't take much time for a technology like CXF to capture the market opportunity.

So, watch this space. I think this technology and other technologies like it, have a very bright future.

Gardner: I was impressed and I wrote a blog recently about this emerging from incubation. I got some really high numbers, which indicated some significant interest.

Last, I am going to Benson at Basis Technology as a user and a committer. How do you expect that you'll be using something like CXF in your implementations over the next 12 months?

Margulies: Well, we're looking at a particular problem, which is coming up with a high-performance Web-service interface to some of our functions, where you put a document and you get some results out. That's quite challenging, because documents are sort of heavyweight, large objects, and the toolkits have not been wildly helpful on this.

So, I've scratched some of the necessary services on CXF and I expect to be digging deeper. The other thing I put in as a comment as a committer is that one of the most important things we're going to see is a user support community.

Long before you get to the point where someone is a possible committer on the program, there is the fact that the users help each other in using the product and using the package, and that's a critical success factor. That community of people who read the mailing list just pitch in and help those newbies find their way from one end to the other.

Gardner: Well, great. Thank you so much. I think we've caught up with CXF, and have quite a bit to look forward to over the coming quarters and months. I want to thank our panel. We've been joined by Dan Kulp, principal engineer at IONA Technologies; Raven Zachary, open source research director for The 451 Group; and Benson Margulies, the CTO at Basis Technology. Thank, everyone.

Kulp: You're very welcome.

Zachary: Thank you.

Margulies: Thank you.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect Podcast on Apache CXF. Thanks and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Sponsor: IONA Technologies.

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on IONA Apache CXF and open-source frameworks. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2008. All rights reserved.