Spring Boot vs. Apache CXF for RESTful Web Services?

Question

I am part of a coding competition, the task is to create a RESTful online marketplace where users can post buy and sell requests via http.

I need to build a front end web service that accepts and stores these requests.

The tech requirements include both Spring boot and CXF. As far as I am aware, both CXF and Spring boot are capable of accepting http requests.

In spring boot, you use a controller like:

@Controller
@EnableAutoConfiguration
public class controller {

    @RequestMapping("/")
    @ResponseBody
    String home() {
        return "Hello, World!";
    }
}

Whereas with CXF (using javax.ws.rs), the code might look like this:

@WebService(serviceName = "MarketService", targetNamespace = "http://localhost:9005")
@Consumes({ MediaType.APPLICATION_XML, MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON })
@Produces({ MediaType.APPLICATION_XML, MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON })
public interface MarketService {

    @GET
    @Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_FORM_URLENCODED)
    @Produces({ MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON })
    @Path("/sells/{id}")
    public prod getProduct(@PathParam("id") int id);

Can someone help me understand the fundamental difference between these two approaches to handling http requests? Is there a way I can use both Spring Boot and CXF in the same application?

Answer 1

Spring MVC and Apache CXF are 2 separate frameworks to handle HTTP requests and that can be used to build REST web services.

• Spring MVC is a project under the Spring "umbrella" (and therefore strongly tied to the Spring framework on top of which it's built),
• Apache CXF is a open-source implementation of JAX-RS (REST) and JAX-WS (SOAP). Apache CXF can be run standalone or be included in a Spring application.

If you are looking to build a REST web service, they are pretty much mutually exclusive (you have to pick one). If all you're going to do is build REST web services, then they're pretty much equivalent. If you also need to have an MVC framework to serve HTML pages, then Spring MVC has that capability (CXF does not).

Personal opinion: Spring MVC is easier to get started with (thanks to Spring Boot which handles most of the configuration for you) than CXF (which requires more XML configuration).

PS: in your CXF example, you have a @WebService annotation. This annotation is part of JAX-WS (SOAP), not JAX-RS (REST). You probably don't need it.