CXF Soap Client fails to connect on first run

Question

When I create a cxf client to call a SOAP web service it returns connection refused or Unexpected end of file from server. The thing is though, it just happens on the first request, afterwards it's like the client is "warmed up" and actually starts working.

Any idea why this is happening?

...
if(port == null) {
  JaxWsProxyFactoryBean factory = new JaxWsProxyFactoryBean();
  factory.getInInterceptors().add(new LoggingInInterceptor());
  factory.getOutInterceptors().add(new LoggingOutInterceptor());
  factory.setAddress("http://localhost:9000/helloWorld");
  port = factory.create(HelloWorld.class);

  ... 
  Client client= ClientProxy.getClient(port);
  HTTPConduit http = (HTTPConduit) client.getConduit();
  HTTPClientPolicy httpClientPolicy = new HTTPClientPolicy();
  httpClientPolicy.setAllowChunking(false);
  http.setClient(httpClientPolicy);
}

port.someMethod();  // fails on first run, but succeeds on all following runs
...

Removing the if-statement would cause the client to fail on every call not just the first. I'm really stuck and would appreciate any help.

Answer 1

It seems that the issue was caused through TLS 1.2. In Java8 the default TLS version changed from TLSv1 to TLSv1.2. TLS 1.2 didn't seem to work even with the latest version of CXF (3.1.7). So the Solution was to set the TLS version to be used for CXF:

...
HTTPClientPolicy httpClientPolicy = new HTTPClientPolicy();
httpClientPolicy.setAllowChunking(false);
httpClientPolicy.setAutoRedirect(true);
httpClientPolicy.setConnection(ConnectionType.KEEP_ALIVE);

String proxyUrl = "http://proxy.com";
String proxyPortString = "8080";
HTTPConduit http = (HTTPConduit)client.getConduit();
SSLContext sslContext = SSLContext.getInstance("TLSv1");
sslContext.init(null, null, null);
HttpsURLConnection.setDefaultSSLSocketFactory(sslContext.getSocketFactory());
TLSClientParameters tlsClientParameters = new TLSClientParameters();
tlsClientParameters.setUseHttpsURLConnectionDefaultSslSocketFactory(true);

http.setTlsClientParameters(tlsClientParameters);
http.setClient(httpClientPolicy);