Mike's Blog: Mike Somekh's blog

As of September 12 2008, GlassFish ESB was made available under a milestone build, due to be released as a fully-fledged product later this year, and I had the opportunity to develop a video to introduce the offering. The "brief" I was given was certainly that! It amounted to "A 5 minute introduction to GlassFish ESB".

So how does one go about summarising several hundred man-years of development effort into 5 minutes?

Well the first step was to ask myself some questions. Who's the audience? How technical should it be? What did we want the viewer to take away with them? The answers hopefully lie with the resulting video. Ironically, the challenges did not lie in figuring out the format or the script but in figuring out how to cut it down to it's shortest possible running time whilst demonstrating the key aspects. Suffice to say, I did not keep to the 5 minutes but I think the introduction video does justice to GlassFish ESB. And I have to thank Don McKinney whose hard work and creativity helped immensely.

So the main points the video gets across can be summarised easily:

• Introduction: GlassFish ESB is a binary distribution of Open ESB components for which you can buy support directly from Sun Microsystems.
• Description: What an ESB is (in our context)
• Services: How easy is it really, to design, implement, build, deploy & test a service in this product?
• Orchestration: How can I create my applications by orchestrating services I’ve created? How easy is it to visualise?
• Tooling: What other features are provided? (transformations, debugging, reporting)
• CASA: How can I manage my deployment requirements separately from my service implementation?
• Outtro: Where to get more info?
• Conclusion: “I can do that” & “it looks like the product can help me. Where do I download it from?” !!

Hopefully more folks will see the benefits that can be had from a free-to-use integration platform which utilises both integrated development & runtime environments and is backed by 24x7 local-language support when required.

Next stop Hollywood - or perhaps not just yet ;-)