Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Webservices and WS-BPEL Process Orchestration

We've just added some functionality to the ESB in support of making invocations on external Webservice Endpoints from within the ESB. This functionality is available right now from SVN and will be officially released in the 4.2GA release (July '07).


The main feature is the ability to construct SOAP requests and consume SOAP responses without having to generate proxy code. All that's required is configuration of the “SOAPClient” action class, specifying the location of the Endpoint WSDL and the name of the operation to be invoked.


Get all the details about the SOAPClient action from the WIKI.


This functionality is very important because it supports SOAP unaware endpoints making invocations on SOAP endpoints. This is only half of the new Webservices functionality being added for 4.2GA. We're also adding functionality to support exposing Webservice interfaces for Webservice unaware endpoints. Milestone Release 2 (MR2) of JBossESB 4.2 prototyped this functionality in the JBossWSAdapter action class. We are about to rework and enhance parts of that prototype for the GA release. More on this later.


With both of these pieces of functionality in place for 4.2GA, not only do we have strong support for Webservices in general, but we also open the door to supporting WS-BPEL style orchestration of Webservice unaware Services through the ESB. To this end, JBoss has partnered with Active Endpoints. Active Endpoints have developed a 1st Class WS-BPEL Engine called ActiveBPEL.


To see how well JBossESB and ActiveBPEL work together, see the flash demos available on the ESB labs pages.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Dive Deep into JBoss ESB

Yesterday Burr hosted a great webinar called "Dive Deep into JBossESB". In typical Burr style he was able to transfer an incredible amount of information. He started of with an overview of all the currently available features in JBossESB tying them to real world scenarios, while sketching out how you would convert your existing applications to get them to play nicely using SOA. The demos showed how easy this really has become. I do have to say that the webinar platform was tough on displaying the jboss-esb.xml file. It would flash by too quickly, but the good thing is that all these demos are part of the JBossESB download, so you can pick them apart and replay them on your own pace. I thought the demos themselves worked very well to demonstrate the capabilities, and they all went off flawlessly. The best demo by far was the jBPM integration demo where he moved a few arrows in the flowchart editor and having the message flow be altered. Great visual!

The questions showed that people really understood the presentation as well as the product, and almost half the people hung around for another 45 minutes to interact with the team to get their questions answered. If we ended up not answering your question, then please take them to the forum, and we'll try to answer it there. The slides have been attached to the wiki , see the link under the 'Presentations' header. If you missed it, there is another session next week May 22nd. You can sign up at the same place in the wiki. A recording of the webinar will be available next week. Don't hesitate to give us any feedback right here in the blog.

I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did :).

--Kurt




JBI 2.0

I was asked to give a BOF at JavaOne around JBI 2.0. Here's what I had to say.

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

JBossESB 4.2 MR2 released

We've just released Milestone Release 2 of JBossESB 4.2. This is quite a significant update for us with a number of significant changes that the team will blog about later, including:

  • WS-BPEL support: now have your BPEL processes exposed through JBossESB.

  • Web Services support through JBossWS integration.

  • More integration with EPRs for messages, such that faults and replies can be routed via the message header information.

  • Support for Oracle AQ as one of the JMS transports.

  • Some cool new quickstarts.

  • Closer jBPM integration.


If you haven't taken a look at JBossESB yet, then I'd encourage you to do so now and give us feedback. This is a community development effort, so come and get involved however you can.