Open ESB v2

2008/07/15

Category: Composite Applications

A service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides application developers with a powerful platform for integrating existing applications and web services. As a platform, SOA provides a set of standard interfaces through which service consumers and providers discover, describe, and interact with application services. Composite application development refers to the process by which these independent services are composed and orchestrated to fulfill an application use case.

Java Specification Request (JSR) 208, Java Business Integration, provides a standards-based integration architecture to enable composite application development. JBI runtime functionality from Project Open ESB is now installed in the SDK. JBI allows you to integra te web services and enterprise applications as loosely coupled composite applications, thereby realizing the benefits of a SOA. In addition to the core runtime, the following JBI components are included:

• A Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) service engine supporting BPEL 2.0 to choreograph service interaction within a composite application. NetBeans SOA Pack 6.1 provides a comprehensive set of visual tools to author, deploy, and test BPEL processes.
  
• A Java EE service engine, which acts as a bridge between the application server and a JBI implementation. Web services defined in the application server are automatically exposed to the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in a JBI environment. Components in the application server can also invoke service providers that are made available through the ESB.
  
• An HTTP/SOAP binding component, which provides access to external web service consumers and providers.

The JBI runtime in Open ESB has been updated in the v2 release. This version significantly enhances composite application development through a JBI-based integration platform fully integrated with the application server. Support has been added for clustering and XA resource recovery, enhanced logging, application configuration, application environment verification, component upgrade, and enhanced monitoring and management of the runtime. JBI components included in this release are: Service Engines for BPEL, Java EE, XSLT, and SQL; and Binding Components for File, HTTP, and JMS. Numerous other Service Engines and Binding Components are available for download from the Open ESB web site.