Smooks on InfoQ

Our very own Tom Fennelly has had a great article on Smooks published on InfoQ. Take a look.

Stonehenge

We just helped start Apache Stonehenge. As I've said elsewhere several times, interoperability is very important for Web Services, so hopefully this will help the industry as a whole as well as our projects.

SOA Platform 4.3 is released!

We're pleased to announce that version 4.3 of our SOA Platform has just been released. We've made quite a few improvements since the first release, including closer integration with JON to provide runtime governance of services, improved Web Services support, better performance, reliability etc. SOA-P 4.3 GA is based on JBossESB 4.4 CP1, so you can grab the source from the repository. As always, give us feedback so we can improve it even more in subsequent releases!

Wise as a JBoss project

We've been working with the Wise project for a while and it's offered us some really nice capabilities. So it's with great pleasure that I can now announce that Wise has moved to become a JBoss Project. Welcome to the entire Wise community! I'm sure we've all got great things ahead!

Evaluating & Getting Started with JBoss ESB

I am personally a learn by example, learn by demonstration kind of person. I prefer to see the technology running before I'm willing to invest time into downloading it, reading the documentation and trying it out. The following items offer a great introduction into the capabilities of the JBoss ESB. Please review them and if you have questions get after us in the online forums.

1) jBPM and ESB 4.2 Demo: http://www.redhat.com/v/webcast/SOAdemo2/SOADemo2.html
A Flash-based recording of just the demonstration portion of the Apr 17th webinar. This is your best starting point if you only have 17 minutes for an immersion into SOA the JBoss way. This demo includes the Spring AOP trick of "eavesdropping" (aka wiretap) on the JPetstore so that the order is routed through the ESB and into a jBPM process which orchestrates the services & manages the human tasks. Drools handles the business logic and Smooks takes care of the XML to POJO transformation. We even show a bit of the JBoss Tools project which has an jboss-esb.xml editor.

2) ESB 4.4 and SOA Platform 4.3 - Deep Dive Webinar
(Oct 2 2008)
This presentation focuses on what's new and cool in the latest versions of JBoss ESB and has live demonstrations of:
- multi-language scripting: a service created via JRuby, Jython, Beanshell, and Groovy
- an Excel spreadsheet for service business logic (decision tables from Drools)
- a declarative model for Web Services & XSD validations, including Visual Basic.NET consumption
- a declarative model for service security based on JAAS
- JBoss Operations Network (JON) management & monitoring tools which now available at: http://www.jboss.org/jopr
Note: Some of these demonstrations require the use of trunk in the JBoss ESB SVN.

3) ESB 4.2 & SOA Platform 4.2 - Deep Dive Webinar
(Apr 17 2008)
SOA: Serivce Oriented Agility - this session introduces the IT challenges that SOA and an ESB address and focuses on the demonstration of how jBPM, Drools & JBoss ESB can be used synergistically to create a service oriented and agile solution. The demonstration portion is same as above, however, there is valuable content in the general presentation and Q&A session.

JBossESB customer visit

I've been spending a fair bit of time recently talking with and visiting customers. Last week it was Amsterdam where we had a really good couple of days. It was fun and informative to meet everyone.

Zero-code Web Services addition

We've had Web Services support in JBossESB for a long time (relative to the age of the project), but it has often required users to code more than they may have liked. Well in recent months we've been working more and more with Stefano Maestri of the wise project to improve things. Stefano has just posted a blog entry on where things now stand with the latest ESB 4.4 release. Well worth taking a look at the posting as well as the ESB!