How do you debug CXF endpoint publishing?

Question

Given the "cxf-osgi" example from fuse source's apache-servicemix-4.4.1-fuse-00-08, built with maven 3.0.3, when deploying it to apache karaf 2.2.4 and CXF 2.4.3 the web service is never published and never visible to the CXF servlet (http://localhost:8181/cxf/). There are no errors in the karaf log. How would one go about debugging such behavior?

Answer 1

It's worth turning up the log level(s) - you can do this permanently in the etc/org.ops4j.pax.logging.cfg or in the console with log:set TRACE org.apache.cxf - IIRC this will show some useful information.

Also check that it's actually published on localhost/127.0.0.1 - it may well be being published on another interface, the IP of the local network but not localhost. Try using 0.0.0.0 as the the address, that way it will bind to all available interfaces.

As you're using maven, you can download the CXF source (easily in Eclipse) and connect a remote debugger to the Karaf instance, with some strategically placed breakpoints you should be able to get a handle on what's going on.

Answer 2

Try changing to Equinox instead of the default of Felix. There is a bug in 2.4.3 in that it doesn't work well with Felix. Alternatively, CXF 2.4.4 is now available that should also fix it.

Answer 3

Take a look at this issue I filed this week: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CXF-4058

What I found is that if my beans.xml is loaded before the cxf bundle jar, then the endpoints are registered with CXF but not with the OSGi http service. So everything looks good from the logs but the endpoints are never accessible. This is a race condition.

I did two workarounds: 1) in the short term, just move my own jars later in the boot order (I use Karaf features) so Spring and CXF are fully loaded before my beans.xml is read and 2) abandon Spring and roll my own binding code based loosely on this approach: http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2012/01/23/an-osgi-jax-rs-connector-part-1-publishing-rest-services/

I just implemented solution #2 yesterday and I'm already extremely happy with it. It's solved all of my classloader issues (before I had to manually add a lot of Import-Package lines because BND doesn't see beans.xml references) and fixed my boot race condition.