Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Swedish Railways and JBossESB

In May 2006, Swedish Railroads (SJ) was looking to upgrade its internal software delivery system in order to provide a shared platform for all IT systems. The integration of the IT systems is essential for SJ as it uses a diverse range of applications ranging from HR to sales, which need to be accessed across a range of interfaces, from PCs to PDAs. Within SJ, a new department was established with the task of building an integration platform and delivering new services for the business to operate on the platform. Swedish Railways is the national railway operator in Sweden. The company has around 350 stations, carrying 70,000 passengers per day. The company employs approximately 3200 staff and has a turnover of approximately $1 billion.

SJ put the contract out to tender, receiving proposals from many of the large SOA/ESB vendors, including JBoss. After extensive trial period SJ selected JBoss middleware solutions for its integration platform, due to its satisfaction with the product, its use of open standards and the impressive performance when compared to the other solutions.

Working with Redpill, the JBoss-based Integration Platform was launched in January 2007. The first major project, in May 2007, was the creation of a ticket auction system to sell unsold tickets on Tradera.com, the Swedish auction website owned by Ebay Inc. Using the ESB, any tickets which have not been sold by SJ with 2 days of departure are automatically transferred to the Tradera system, where they are available for auction until 6 hours before departure. On the 4th of October 2007 SJ went live with JBossESB! SJ's CEO did a live demo at a press conference to announce the release. The news was reported by every major paper and news channels, so this is a great success for SR, Redpill and JBossESB.

As the first test of the new SJ Integration Platform, the Tradera.com integration project based on JBossESB was a resounding success, and completed within only 4 months. SJ is now able to sell thousands more tickets per week, which previously went unsold. The entire process is automated, with the details of the unsold tickets being passed directly to the Tradera system.

Now that the Integration Platform is up and running, SJ plans to deliver a new project every 2 months. The upcoming projects come from both internal and external demand, for projects which could either be consolidating existing systems or creating new products.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

A satisfied JBossESB user

I meant to reference this a few weeks back. It's always nice to get feedback from users who are deploying JBossESB in the field. I spoke with Igor about his application and why he chose JBossESB and this is what he had to say:

"I designed a complete framework for a health/wellness startup. It provides health and wellnes services to individuals and corporations/partners via the web and mobile phones. All requests from users go through a business process manager, which in turn orchestrates the process by invoking appropriate services via JBoss ESB. In some instances the logic routes the request to a local Spring managed POJO to execute the service. The same POJOs are actually handling requests via ESB. I created what I called SpringJbossEsbActionProxy to actually grab appropriate Spring managed POJO instead of instantiating a new service class for every invocation.

Though I am not a JBossESB expert, but I am happy I decided to use the product and will recommend it to my future clients.
"

Thanks for the blog entry Igor. If there are any others out there like this, let us know.

Thursday, November 1, 2007

JBossESB 4.2.1 GA is out!

The JBossESB team have done it again and released another great update to JBossESB. Although this release is primarily to catch bugs and improvements to reliability and performance, there are a few new features that you may find interesting. Take a look: it's well worth it.

Congratulations to the whole team!