Hi Steve,
I basically think you are right. CXF introduces a lot of dependencies
when you add it to your application. For a project manager at the
company I work this was almost a reason to throw CXF out and do
the parsing by hand. While many maven projects tend to collect
dependencies CXF is an especially bad example here.
I would vote for making cleaning out dependencies a high priority issue.
What do other CXF developers think?
BTW. If you have CXF in your project it does not make a lot of sense to
also use Axis. I think you should decide on time for your project which
webservice stack to use and stick with it.
Greetings
Christian
Steve Cohen schrieb:
My "problem" is more philosophical than anything, and I'm not sure
it's really a problem. But, consider that by adding a web service
client, a small new piece of my application's functionality, the WAR
file size has ballooned in size from 3MB to over 10MB. Additionally,
as I look at the 33 or so jars it was necessary to add to the war in
order to get the thing to run (and I manually hacked 14 out of the
dependencies generated by Maven which I found NOT to be needed), I
can't say I know what most of them do. Why, for example, was it
necessary to include pieces of the Spring framework, even though my
application doesn't use that framework? What, for Pete's sake, is
Neethi, and why was it necessary to add it? Quite a lot of stuff for
the "simple" task of marshalling and unmarshalling data into SOAP-XML
packets and sending them across the wire. From their names, it looks
as though some of them repeat functionality that is available in other
jars - but who has time to investigate? I also have a little nagging
fear that down the road a few weeks, when I have to add my NEXT web
service client to this app (and this one uses AXIS) I will end up
adding another bunch of jars, some of which may conflict with the ones
just added.
In other words I feel that I've lost control of my application.
Prior to this, I understood my dependencies. I understand that
there's a tradeoff here. In return for letting go of control of my
dependencies, I have a potentially much simpler and more automated
build process - and I know that's a good thing - especially when and
if I convert the project's entire build process to Maven. And
speaking of CXF in particular, I like that the client code I need to
write is not particularly ugly, as it is with some other SOAP
platforms (AXIS - grr grr). But I continue to wonder whether it isn't
a problem that Maven encourages these chains of dependencies that grow
geometrically without appropriate consideration to developer
understanding being given. For the sake of developer understanding,
would it perhaps be a good thing if pom.xml dependency elements had a
required <comment> element that the composer of a POM would have to
think about before issuing a POM to the world? Or maybe a newer
version of CXF will pare the dependencies down to what is truly needed
to run client-side and server-side apps.
<end of rant>
--
Christian Schneider
---
http://www.liquid-reality.de
