XOP support in CXF JAXRS

An XML-binary Optimized Packaging (XOP) is a W3C specification which is mainly associated with a SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) but is equally applicable to plain XML.

XOP is actually a very good specification which provides for the inclusion of binary data in XML payloads via links to co-located or external parts and thus facilitates the processing of such payloads by technologies like XSLT or even XMLSecurity, this article gives a pretty good description.

A CXF user has recently tried to have a single Java service class serving both SOAP MTOM and 'basic' HTTP multipart-related requests. Now, it is possible to do it, but I found it was not quite appealing so to say for users having to create either MTOM or multipart/related (with no links from the root part) payloads for the whole idea to work out. In addition, users have to add CXF JAXRS Multipart annotations to every method parameters corresponding to individual multipart parts which was not ideal given that the same user was also experimenting with a document-first approach.

So it took me virtually 1 day to add a XOP support to CXF JAXRS, thanks, as usual, to the fact that CXF has it all, specifically, attachment interceptors already deal with MTOP/XOP and its JAXB databinding has all the related utility code required for serializing/deserializing XOP payloads. One would need to set a CXF Message.MTOM-ENABLED property on CXF JAXRS clients/endpoints, but I think it is ok even though a property name is SOAP related, but it is really just an indicator to CXF as to whether do XOP or not.

I think it is a good enhancement indeed :

- SOAP users doing multiparts (MTOM) can have a simpler option for reusing the same code base when trying to do HTTP/REST as well, the only restriction at the moment is that CXF JAXRS will not unwrap the complex data types, example, just have a single EmailPayload method parameter, as opposed to many parameters corresponding to EmailPayload parts, such as text, attachments, etc; it is better anyway IMHO

- it is just a nice to have feature for CXF JAXRS users to play with, as far the multiparts support is concerned

The only regret I have is that I started working on it late enough and thus did not have it merged into soon to be released 2.2.7.