Cross Origin access to restful jax-rs service

Question

I have created a jax-rs restful service using cxf and annotated my scala service implementation to expose cors headers:

@Path("/foo/{date}")
@Produces(Array("application/xml"))
@CrossOriginResourceSharing(allowAllOrigins = true)
class Foo {
    @GET
    @Path("{id}")
    def doStuff(@PathParam("date") date: util.Date, @PathParam("id") id: Int) = ...
}

In my Spring applicationContext.xml I have registered a cors filter within the jaxrs:providers list

<bean id="corsFilter" class="org.apache.cxf.rs.security.cors.CrossOriginResourceSharingFilter"
        p:allowCredentials="true"/>

I can happily use the endpoint directly from Firefox/IE via http://localhost:8080/foo/2012-07-17/123 but I am trying to build a service which will be invoked from another web application in order to decouple the two.

When I make the request directly through Firefox I see the following:

Response Headers
Content-Length                  5699
Content-Type                    application/xml
Date                            Wed, 18 Jul 2012 16:49:09 GMT
Server                          Apache-Coyote/1.1

Request Headers
Accept                          text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding                 gzip, deflate
Accept-Language                 en-us,en;q=0.5
Cache-Control                   max-age=0
Connection                      keep-alive
Cookie                          DWRSESSIONID=Q62Vf$dv*S9sA8EaJm6jKW6$pyj; JSESSIONID=17E120C419F075B505447F151124BC18
Host                            localhost:9580
User-Agent                      Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1

And when I make the request via Ajax from a webpage on my local disk I see the following:

Response Headers
Access-Control-Allow-Cred...    true
Access-Control-Allow-Orig...    *
Content-Length                  6177
Content-Type                    application/xml
Date                            Wed, 18 Jul 2012 16:41:21 GMT
Server                          Apache-Coyote/1.1

Request Headers
Accept                          */*
Accept-Encoding                 gzip, deflate
Accept-Language                 en-us,en;q=0.5
Connection                      keep-alive
Cookie                          DWRSESSIONID=Q62Vf$dv*S9sA8EaJm6jKW6$pyj; JSESSIONID=17E120C419F075B505447F151124BC18
Host                            localhost:8080
Origin                          null
User-Agent                      Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1

I can get this to work fine in IE using prototype.js but there's a further complication with Firefox, I assume because the webservice is projected by an NTLM servlet filter. I've been using jQuery for non-msie browsers in order to pass through credentials using the xhrFields property, and I can see my service being invoked in the debugger from both IE & Firefox, but my response is blank when invoked from Firefox.

Is this even possible?

Answer 1

It appears that Firefox does not respect the Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header - changing the @CrossOriginResourceSharing annotation to specify the list of host/port combinations which will access the end point fixed the issue.