Future directions for JBossWS

[karypid]

Hello all,

I am writing to inquire what the plans for the future of JBossWS-Native are. As far as I could find on the net, this stack was born by forking Axis code and modifying it to achieve J2EE compliance and never got re-merged, thus forming a project of its own for quite some time now.

Recently though, JBoss was able to pass the J2EE TCK using JBossWS-CXF. I also read in an interview on DZone http://java.dzone.com/videos/mark-little-tech-chat?mz=3006-jboss with Mark Little, that you guys intend to stop doing everything "in house" and focus on using CXF as an officially supported stack in EAP 5:

DZone: At one point it seemed that JBoss was trying to build everything it needed within its own ecosystem. That seems to be changing though.
Mark Little: ....... For instance, as I mentioned earlier, we're now using the Apache CXF project as our Web Services stack. We still maintain our own Web Services stack at the moment, but the aim is that CXF will become the default Web Services stack at some point in the future.

So, is JBossWS-Native going to stick around or is the long-term plan to gradually "drop" it?

[asoldano]

JBoss.Net was born forking Axis, it was used for JBoss AS 3.x and then reached end of life. It was replaced by a new j2ee 1.4 compatible webservice stack (JBossWS) in 2006.
Later in 2008, the JBossWS Web Service Framework allowed us to properly use multiple webservice stacks on top of JBoss AS, one of them being Apache CXF.

Currently we maintain both JBossWS-Native and JBossWS-CXF, as well as supporting the former in EAP 4.x for years since the release (please get in touch with customer support for further details).
EAP 5 is going to provide support for both stacks instead.
As Mark said, given the current status, in the long term JBossWS-CXF will become the default JBoss WS stack, but that's not going to happen tomorrow.

[karypid]

Thank you for the quick history review. BTW, the reason I am asking is because I would like to work on web services and in particular for JBoss. I was just trying to select a path that will be useful in the long-term.

I've been looking at relevant JBoss code (the SPI and JBossWS-Native and also started looking at CXF and the JBossWS-CXF integration layer). I think I'll focus on CXF code for now.

[asoldano]

OK. If you planning / considering contributing, please get in touch with me.