Are CXF client proxies thread safe?

Question

I\'m using CXF to generate SOAP client classes. In the CXF documentation, they write

Are JAX-WS client proxies thread safe?

Official JAX-WS answer

Answer 1

You're probably referring to runtime, but I don't think configuration time is meant to be threadsafe. I believe I've seen a race condition in JettyHTTPServerEngineFactory.

In a test harness we bring up multiple unrelated SOAP servers and when they share a Bus there's a potential for a race condition if multiple threads attempt to add JettyHTTPServerEngine instances at the same time. The specific race condition is in setTLSServerParametersForPort(), which you call when you want to use HTTPS for a port. That method adds elements to a HashMap with no locking.

I guess the reason others don't encounter this is that most people configure CXF via configuration files, and it's rare to have multiple ports/Jetty servers in one process.

Answer 2

We recently ran into similar discussion in our project. As specified in the FAQ you are referring to, except for the features that modify HTTP conduit on the fly (ex: session management and failover features), the CXF client proxy is thread safe. So if you do not use these features then it is okay to share the client proxy between threads.