Create wadl from existing CXF service

Question

I have a JAX-RS service implemented with CXF. How can i generate wadl? Or is there something like with a shirt http: //path.to.your/restapp/application.wadl there already? is there a maven plugin like wsdl, java for wsdl? I was looking for answers that could not be found.

Answer 1

If you are using the latest version of CXF, just click the service with the _wadl parameter.

Answer 2

There are many possible ways to generate WADL using CXF:

• You can send a REST call (e.g. Postman ) to the REST URL base, and it will automatically create a WADL for all services available from there. This can help structure the REST API. For example:
  • http://app.com/purchase/?_wadl - create a WADL for the purchase API
  • http://app.com/profile/?_wadl - create a WADL for the user profile API
• CXF 3.0.0 and 2.7.11 are a java2wadl plugin for generating WADL during build. Details can be found here .
• All of the available CXF functionality regarding WADL is in the CXF docs .

After creating WADL, it would be convenient to convert XML to a more readable form. One solution I found was to use XSL to generate HTML. I used XSL from the github project . The steps for linking XSL to XML and generating a pretty HTML report:

• Download wadl.xsl;
• Copy the wadl.xsl file to the folder containing the wadl.xml file that CXF generated;

• Add the required header in wadl.xml to the top of the file:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

  <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="wadl.xsl"?>

• Replace the <application ...> header in the created wadl.xml using <wadl:application xmlns:wadl="http://wadl.dev.java.net/2009/02" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://wadl.dev.java.net/2009/02 wadl.xsd ">

• Add to each wadl tag namespace. For instance:

  <resource> → <wadl:resource>

  </resource> → </wadl:resource>

• Open wadl.xml with IE

• You will get something like this (example_wadl.xml from the github project ):