I have been somewhat reluctantly dragged into using CXF (version 2.0.7)
by deadline pressure and vendor recommendation. I like many things
about it but there are issues. I've ranted about some of these issues
before, but don't want to dredge them up again. I believe it is
overkill for my needs, simply to create a SOAP client to access a
vendor's web service.
Nonetheless, here I am.
I am trying to deploy a CXF-based Web Service client into an
architecture that runs on Tomcat 6.0. We DO NOT at present use the
Spring Framework, although we may look at doing so as time permits, but
time does not permit such an exploration now. I have up to now used an
architectural principle that produces ONE war file that runs on all
tiers (dev, test, production) with differences between tiers resolved at
runtime by properties files, etc.
Our vendor has two systems, one for development and one for production.
Switching endpoints is managed by having CXF load different WSDLs. This
is suboptimal but manageable at runtime, by using properties files, and
needless to say, I don't want to be modifying the vendor's WSDL and
maintaining that over time.
The backbreaker appears to be getting the CXF configuration to load.
This should be simple but it's turning into a nightmare. The vendor
also has given us different credentials for access to the different
tiers of his service and these can only be loaded via the CXF
configuration, apparently.
I can't find any method that allows my application to select the proper
CXF config file at runtime. The only method by which my application is
able to successfully authenticate itself to vendor's service is by
placing the credentials a in file named "cxf.xml" (nothing else will do)
residing on the web app's classpath inside the war file. I have tried
the suggestions at the top of
http://cwiki.apache.org/CXF20DOC/configuration.html, specifically
CXF can discover XML configuration files which you have written. For
both web service clients and servers, the default location that CXF
will look for a configuration for is "/cxf.xml" on the class path. If
you wish to override this location, you can specify a command line
property: -Dcxf.config.file=some_other_config.xml. To use a url as the
configuration location, specify as follows:
-Dcxf.config.file.url=config_file_url.
and none of them work in my environment. Although my app can see the
system property "cxf.config.file" it does not affect how CXF finds its
configuration. My suspicions are either
1) The advice above does not work in CXF 2.0.7 which is what I am
using. If I can be assured that it fixed in a later release, I might be
tempted to make the switch.
2) This is a bug which does not work at all in any version of CXF.
3) this is another feature of CXF that depends on tighter integration
with Spring (I do have to include its jars but I'm not USING the
framework). This is becoming an annoying theme here - if this is the
reason, you guys might think about naming yourselves Spring XML
Framework. It annoys me that so much advice here assumes I'm using
Spring. If that is a requirement, it needs to be more strongly
advertised in your materials. Hopefully this is not the case.
Can someone please enlighten me as to what is going on here? Switching
between different authentication credentials should not be this hard and
I'm willing to try almost anything at this point other than suggestions
that I migrate to Spring, change my build process, etc. While perhaps
worthwhile, I have no time for such things now.
