Introduction

Apache CXF is well known as a services framework for supporting RPC style communication via SOAP. CXF is also known for its ability to provide REST services through a JAX-WS Provider/Dispatch| which provides an easy mechanism to allow SOAP web service to act more like a REST web service, though it is still essentially RPC/HTTP style approach.

However, CXF does have full blown REST support through JAX-RS and also provides many other features.

http://cxf.apache.org/docs/jax-rs.html

CXF REST has a good spring integration as well as good Maven support. It is extremely easy to configure. It does not, however, have any built-in support for HATEOAS.

Details

The default JSON encoder in CXF is Jettison, which uses produces JSON via XML using the Badgerfish Convention. This produces a kind of verbose JSON that is reportedly more difficult to parse using various popular Javascript libraries.

However, CXF supports pluggable JSON encoders and one can easily substitute Jackson for increased interoperability (and reportedly better performance).