Apache WSS4J 2.1.0 released

A new major release of Apache WSS4J, 2.1.0, has been released. The previous major release of almost a year ago, Apache WSS4J 2.0.0, had a lot of substantial changes (see the migration guide), such as a new set of maven modules, a new streaming implementation, changes to configuration tags, package changes for CallbackHandlers, etc. In contrast, WSS4J 2.1.0 has a much smaller set of changes, and users should be able to upgrade with very few changes (if at all). This post briefly covers the new features and migration issues for WSS4J 2.1.0.

Here are the new features of WSS4J 2.1.0:

• JDK7 minimum requirement: WSS4J 2.1.0 requires at least JDK7. The project source has also been updated to make use of some of the new features of JDK7, such as try-with-resources, etc.
• OpenSAML 3.x support: WSS4J 2.1.0 upgrades from OpenSAML 2.x to 3.x (currently 3.1.0). This is an important upgrade, as OpenSAML 2.x is not currently supported.
• Extensive code refactoring. A lot of work was done to make the retrieval of security results easier and faster.

Here are the migration issues in WSS4J 2.1.0:

• Due to the OpenSAML 3.x upgrade, you will need to make a small change in your SAML CallbackHandlers, if you are specifying the "Version". In WSS4J 2.0.x, you could specify the SAML Version by passing a "org.opensaml.common.SAMLVersion" instance through to the SAMLCallback.setSamlVersion(...) method. The "org.opensaml.common" package is removed in OpenSAML 3.x. Instead, a new Version bean is provided in WSS4J 2.1.0, that can be passed to the setSamlVersion method on SAMLCallback as before. See here for an example.
• The Xerces and xml-apis dependencies in the DOM code of Apache WSS4J 2.1.0 have been removed (previously they were at "provided" scope).
• If you have a custom Processor instance to process a token in the security header in some custom way, you must add the WSSecurityEngineResult that is generated by the processing, to the WSDocInfo Object via the "addResult" method. Otherwise, it will not be available when security results are retrieved and processed.