G2

Janaka B.

Software Engineer

Computer Software

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

1/18/2019

"Easiest way to build a clean JAX-RS REST API - and any other Java web service of your choice"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Apache CXF?

Ability to dynamically generate client proxies on-demand at runtime, by providing the appropriate API (controller) interface class

Annotated interface concept allows you to define a common API module (set of lightweight, annotated (e.g. fully JAX-RS) interfaces) and base your server and client on it, leading to a very clean design

Ability to plug in desired serialization providers (e.g. Jackson JSON Provider)

Interceptors, e.g. for automatically converting HTTP error responses into Java exceptions

For JAX-RS APIs, ability to leverage all the familiar JAX-RS server and client semantics (e.g. WebClient, builder-style request and response operations) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Apache CXF?

Some edge configurations may not be fully supported; e.g. we faced one case where we needed to fetch accept form-data params on our REST service backend, one of them as an InputStream; but CXF didn't have a way to facilitate this (at least in 3.1.11 which we use in production), so eventually we had to modify our API. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Apache CXF:

Make good use of interceptors to ensure a smooth code-level integration for users of your CXF-based API client; e.g. if you don't explicitly map HTTP error responses to Java exceptions, the autogenerated proxy client will simply throw generic WebApplicationExceptions, which the users will then need to specifically traverse in order to determine the actual service-level error. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Apache CXF solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use Apache CXF as the core of the Java client library for our On-Premise Enterprise Integration Platform (https://www.g2crowd.com/products/ips-enterprise-integration-platform) which has a JAX-RS compatible REST API for all management operations. For 20 different API subinterfaces (controllers) the CXF client took only about 100 lines of code (all just code-level configurations), and has been working rock-solid ever since. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.