The JAX-RS world now has at least 4 different implementations to choose from. But which is the best? Is that a valid question to ask at all? Well Solomon Duskis has set out to try to answer the question as best he can but comparing and contrasting the leading lights in this area.
CXF is a fully featured Open Source Web Services Framework which people claim is easy to use and is industrial strength. CXF is also embeddable and people have used it often in combination with Spring. CXF is the combination of the Celtix and XFire communities coming together at Apache.
Dan Diephouse has posted a paper, titled "Navigating WS-*", that provides an excellent overview of Web services standards and their respective relevance for solving real-world problems.
enunciate 1.0, a J2EE web service deployment framework that provides a complete development-to-deployment system for creating SOAP, REST, and JSON endpoints, was released last week. enunciate is not a web service stack like Axis2 or XFire. Rather, it uses XFire and Spring to provide a code-first development model (not in itself novel) that enforces compatibility contracts at compile time.
The results of a performance benchmark published by Axis2 committers has created a flood of blog entries, some of which contain useful information.
Backed by Hummer Winblad and Morgenthaler ventures to the tune of $4M dollars, CEO Dave Rosenberg and Mule ESB Open Source Leader Ross Mason are ready to take on the biggest ESB players with their Open Source ESB strategy. But not only are other ESB companies waiting, but the field is already crowded with other Open Source options.
MuleSource, the company founded earlier this year to provide support and services to Mule users, has released Mule 1.3 today. Mule is the most commonly used open-source Enterprise Service Bus, with over 200,000 downloads. The new version improves performance and adds support for XFire and Spring Remoting.
XFire, the high performance Java SOAP framework from Codehaus has released version 1.2, the last version before the project merges with Celtix into Apache CeltiXfire. XFire includes such features as Spring integration, JBI support, and pluggable bindings for POJOs, JAXB, and XMLBeans. Improvements since version 1.1 include JiBX data binding, Aegis binding inheritance, and HTTP GZIP.
