Kohsuke Kawaguchi's Blog

Introducing Metro

In the past few weeks, I've been mostly working on the launch of Metro, a web service distribution built around the JAX-WS RI and WSIT.

I think this move is a bit like the one we did with JWSDP, for those of you who remember. Back then, we've been developing a bunch of composable but independent technologies (JAXP, JAXB, JAXM, SAAJ, JAX-RPC, JAXR, ...), and we realized that for most people they are too fine-grained. It is more convenient to be able to get them in a bundle, with a lot of testing to ensure that pieces work together.

In many ways, Metro is just that. The JAX-WS RI is made highly extensible and pluggable, so that enabled us to build composable but independent features (like transaction, security, reliability, custom transports, Spring support, JSON, ...) on top of the basic web service. But for most users, especially for those who are not using a dependency management system like Ivy or Maven, this is actually a nightmare, because you need to deal with a dozen or more of small jars. And as the number of configuration increases, people feel less comfortable about whether their particular configuration is tested.

Another goal of Metro is to enable us to consolidate documentation and samples. Today, the core JAX-WS RI has its own set of samples, documents, and FAQs. So does WSIT. While it wasn't intended, we ended up asking our users to figure out whether a particular topic that they were looking for falls into WSIT, JAX-WS RI, or jax-ws-commons.

This launch is not the end of this effort, but rather the start of it. In fact internally we call this phase 1, so for now, we have website, downloadable bundle (both milestone release and nightlies), but samples and documentation are incomplete. The phase 2 will include the followings:

• Unify the existing WSIT samples into Metro
• Unify documentation
• Cut down the size of jars significantly by removing pieces like JAX-RPC
• Bring WSIT tooling into Metro

Let us know what you think.

Comments

• Hi There,
  
  nice move
  
  Are you gonna update the comparison chart of Metro vs Axis 2 vs xFire vs Jboss Ws ? At the same time, would be nice to know how Spring Webservices compares to all of this .
  
  BR,
  ~A

  Posted by: anjanb2 on June 19, 2007 at 04:12 PM

• The comparison chart is already updated. I'm not too sure about "Spring web services" — I didn't realize that it has its own web service stack; I thought it just lets you integrate with other webservice stack, such as Metro or XFire.

  Posted by: kohsuke on June 19, 2007 at 04:16 PM

• Great job, I asked couple of weeks ago in the jaxws-jaxb forum if JWSDP (the bundle idea) was dead. Metro is the best answer to that I guess :) I just hope it will be updated more frequently than JWSDP bundles. We (the community) should support this move with our feedback and bug reports. Thanks

  Posted by: marlor on June 20, 2007 at 02:25 AM

• Thanks. we do have a tentative roadmap and release schedule, which I hope to post soon. Do expect more frequent releases than JWSDP, but stay tuned fore more details later...

  Posted by: kohsuke on June 20, 2007 at 09:36 AM

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