In Apache Camel, the Camel CXF component is the key to integrating routes with Web services. You can use the Camel CXF component to create a CXF endpoint, which can be used in either of the following ways:

In the current demonstration, we are interested in creating a Camel CXF consumer endpoint, with the dataFormat option set to POJO.

The Camel CXF component requires you to add a dependency on the camel-cxf component in your Maven POM. For example, the pom.xml file from the customer-ws-camel-cxf-pojo demonstration project includes the following dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
  <artifactId>camel-cxf</artifactId>
  <version>${camel-version}</version>
</dependency>

The cxf:bean: URI is used to bind an Apache CXF endpoint to a route and has the following general syntax:

cxf:bean:CxfEndpointID[?Options]

Where CxfEndpointID is the ID of a bean created using the cxf:cxfEndpoint element, which configures the details of the WS endpoint. You can append options to this URI (where the options are described in detail in CXF in Apache Camel Documentation). If you do not specify any additional options, the endpoint uses the POJO data format by default.

For example, to start a route with a Apache CXF endpoint that is configured by the bean with ID, customer-ws, define the route as follows:

<route>
    <from uri="cxf:bean:customer-ws"/>
    ...
</route>

	Note
	There is an alternative URI syntax, cxf://WsAddress[?Options], which enables you to specify all of the WS endpoint details in the URI (so there is no need to reference a bean instance). This typically results in a long and cumbersome URI, but is useful in some cases. For details, see CXF in Apache Camel Documentation.

The cxf:cxfEndpoint element is used to define a WS endpoint that binds either to the start (consumer endpoint) or the end (producer endpoint) of a route. For example, to define the customer-ws WS endpoint referenced in the preceding route, you would define a cxf:cxfEndpoint element as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans ...
   xmlns:cxf="http://camel.apache.org/schema/cxf"  ...>
    ...  
    <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf.xml" />
    <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-soap.xml" />
    <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-http.xml"/>  
    <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/osgi/cxf-extension-osgi.xml"/>
  
    <cxf:cxfEndpoint id="customer-ws"
        address="http://0.0.0.0:9191/Customer"
        endpointName="c:SOAPOverHTTP"
        serviceName="c:CustomerService"
        serviceClass="com.fusesource.demo.wsdl.customerservice.CustomerService"
        xmlns:c="http://demo.fusesource.com/wsdl/CustomerService/"/>
    ...
</beans>

Important

Remember that the cxf:cxfEndpoint element and the jaxws:endpoint element use different XML schemas (although the syntax looks superficially similar). These elements bind a WS endpoint in different ways: the cxf:cxfEndpoint element instantiates and binds a WS endpoint to an Apache Camel route, whereas the jaxws:endpoint element instantiates and binds a WS endpoint to a Java class (using the JAX-WS mapping).

Apache CXF deploys the WS endpoint into a Jetty servlet container instance and the address attribute of cxf:cxfEndpoint is therefore used to configure the addressing information for the endpoint in the Jetty container.

Specify a complete HTTP URL, including the host and IP port (the value of the IP port effectively identifies the target Jetty container). Typically, for a Jetty container, you specify the host as 0.0.0.0, which is interpreted as a wildcard that matches every IP network interface on the local machine (that is, if deployed on a multi-homed host, Jetty opens a listening port on every network card). For example, to deploy the endpoint to the custom Jetty container listening on IP port, 9191:

address="http://0.0.0.0:9191/Customers"

	Note
	If you want to configure a secure endpoint (secured by SSL), you would specify the https: scheme in the address.

The serviceClass attribute of the cxf:cxfEndpoint element references the SEI of the Web service, which in this case is the CustomerService interface.

Because of the modular structure of Apache CXF, additional configuration is added as needed using the relevant <import ...> tags in XML. In the most recent version of Apache CXF (later than 2.4.3), only the META-INF/cxf/cxf.xml resource is needed.

For more details, see Importing XML resources.