CXF JAX-RS on Apache TomEE

Yesterday I got a post comment about some problems with running CXF JAX-RS on Apache Tomcat. But also 2 weeks ago Apache TomEE 1.0 has been officially released. I decided to rework the example without using Spring (which was causing the problems with JAX-RS) and deploy it to TomEE.

My project was based on the original one from this post (published over 3 years ago! April 2009): Dveloping RESTful Web Services using Apache CXF and Maven2.


Updating the original project

I decided to get rid of Spring from my project and to use Apache TomEE Plus (TomEE with additional OpenEJB and CXF jars) to manage my rest service.

To build JavaEE 6 web application I decided to use new Codehaus MOJO archetype. Instead of webapp-jee5 I used newer webapp-javaee6 archetype.

From CXF dependencies I only copied cxf-rt-frontend-jaxrs and updated its version from 2.1.4 to 2.5.2. Also I changed its scope to provided (as CXF is shipped with TomEE Plus).

After I copied and pasted my old code I changed @ProduceMime to @Produces (by the time I wrote my previous post JAX-RS was not final yet).

Setting up TomEE Plus and running the application

I downloaded TomEE Plus (with CXF-powered JAX-WS and JAX-RS runtime). Then, in Eclipse, I added new Tomcat 7 server and pointed it out to TomEE installation directory (TomEE is fully compatibile with Tomcat 7). Next I ran the application, but got the following exception: 

Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unresolved variables; only 0 value(s) given for 1 unique variable(s)
 at org.apache.cxf.jaxrs.impl.UriBuilderImpl.substituteVarargs(UriBuilderImpl.java:185)
 at org.apache.cxf.jaxrs.impl.UriBuilderImpl.doBuild(UriBuilderImpl.java:82)
 at org.apache.cxf.jaxrs.impl.UriBuilderImpl.build(UriBuilderImpl.java:75)

After a quick playing around it turned out that name path param cannot be defined at the class level. I moved this definition to the first method and added @Path("/greetings") to the class.

I restarted the application and all worked like a charm.

To test I opened the following links in my browser:

http://localhost:8080/cxf-jax-rs-example/greetings/name/lukasz
http://localhost:8080/cxf-jax-rs-example/greetings/name/lukasz/state/poland
http://localhost:8080/cxf-jax-rs-example/greetings/name/lukasz/state/poland/test1/test2/test3

And this time no Spring configuration at all! TomEE and JavaEE 6 rock!

Summary

The source code is here: https://github.com/lukasz-budnik/cxf-jax-rs-example.

There is also one point to note. TomEE is insanely fast!

enjoy,
Łukasz