Apache CXF and WS-Discovery

One of the new features in Apache CXF 2.7.x that I worked hard on was the introduction of support for WS-Discovery. WS-Discovery is basically a standard way for a service to announce when it’s available as well as standard way to probe the network for services that meet certain criteria and have the services that meet that criteria provide a response. Most ESB’s now have some sort of registry component or locator component or similar that provide a similar need. However, they are generally more proprietary in nature and, in many cases, will only work with services deployed in or managed by that ESB. WS-Discovery is completely standards based (OASIS) and is completely independent of any ESB, application server, etc…

So, how does it work? If the CXF WS-Discovery jars/bundles are available when a service starts, CXF will automatically register a ServerLifecycleListener onto the Bus. When the service starts, that listener will send a WS-Discovery “HELLO” message out on the network using the SOAP over UDP spec. When the service stops, it will send a “BYE” message out. Most users don’t need those messages, but if you do have an application that needs to keep track of services that are available, you could listen for them. The CXF WS-Discovery listener will also start an internal WS-Discovery service that will listen for SOAP/UDP “PROBE” requests on the network, process those requests to see if the service matches it, and respond with information (such as the address URL) if it does. This is all automatic. All that is needed is to add the WS-Discovery jars.

CXF also provides an API for probing the network for services. It’s only slightly documented right now, but you can easily look at the source for WSDiscoveryClient. Basically, some simple code like:

WSDiscoveryClient client = new WSDiscoveryClient();
List references 
    = client.probe(new QName("http://cxf.apache.org/hello_world/discovery",
                             "Greeter"));
client.close();
        
//loop through all of them and have them greet me.
GreeterService service = new GreeterService();
for (EndpointReference ref : references) {
     Greeter g = service.getPort(ref, Greeter.class);
     System.out.println(g.greetMe("World"));
}

would use the WSDiscoveryClient to probe the network for all the services that can provide the “Greeter” service and then calls off to each one. It’s very simple.

The main problem with the WS-Discovery implementation in CXF 2.7.0 through 2.7.4 was that it only implemented WS-Discovery 1.1 as that is the actual OASIS standard that I looked at. However, there are many devices out there that only will respond to WS-Discovery 1.0 probes. In particular, any of the IP cameras that implement the ONVIF specification will only respond to 1.0. Thus, in 2.7.5, I updated the code to also handle WS-Discovery 1.0. The WSDiscoveryClient object has a setVersion10() method on it to change the probes over to WS-Discovery 1.0. With support for WS-Discovery 1.0, you can now use CXF to probe for any devices on the network that meet the ONVIF standard. No proprietary registry or anything required.

That’s pretty cool.

Now that the WS-Discovery stuff in CXF is fairly well tested and is known to work, I expect more of the downstream consumers of CXF to start integrating it into product offerings. I’m hoping to work on getting the Talend locator updated to use it. However, with the next (5.3.1) version of Talend ESB (due next month), you’ll be able to just “feature:install” the cxf-ws-discovery feature into the ESB and have the above all work. I also see that JBoss has already started integrating it into their application server.