But I digress... Rick Palkovic's blog

Here's a review of another JavaOne session:

TS-3175 Building a Service with BPEL and the Java(TM) EE Platform: How Composite Applications and JBI Simplify SOA Development
Presenters: Gopalan Suresh Raj, Ron Ten-Hove, and Peter Walker

Now, here's a presentation I've been looking forward to. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been around for a decade or more, but the promise of widely distributed composite applications hosted on web servers has made it the hot topic in programming recently.

I've only recently been exposed to SOA, having helped Gopalan Raj and others author an article on the topic, scheduled for release later this month. The man clearly knows what he's talking about -- and here is Gopalan now, ready to deliver in the flesh. His task, we quickly learn, is to present a demonstration SOA application that will make all the high-level descriptions concrete.

But first, Ron gives us some background on SOA. He points out that the "services" in Service-Oriented Architecture can do just about anything you can think of -- transform data, query databases, integrate existing assets, and so on. Furthermore, they can be implemented in almost any technology -- XSLT, BPEL, SQL, and many other acronyms. The integration technology that holds them together is what turns them into a SOA composite application. For this session, the integration technology that holds them all together is BPEL, the Business Process Execution Language.

Ron steps in to describe BPEL as "a flowchart for a conversation" between an application's service providers and consumers. BPEL processes are expressed in XML notation. Using constructs like partner link definitions derived from the Web Service Definition Language (WSDL), BPEL describes inbound and outbound service interfaces. When combined with Java Business Integration (JBI), which provides the messaging infrastructure, these technologies let you re-use existing Java EE code transparently so that it can easily be integrated into other processes or applications.

Finally, Gopalan is called upon to do his thing. Using the NetBeans 5.5 Beta IDE, he shows how to put together a composite application with Java EE platform tools and an application server that supports JBI. Everything is going fine until he tries to build and deploy the application, when he is betrayed by beta-level software and falls into some sort of infinite loop. You can see the smiles of sympathy in the audience as Murphy's Law takes over the demo. Everybody, at one time or another, has been there and done that.

The presentation is effective nonetheless. My take-away is that you can begin using the NetBeans 5.5 IDE and other downloadable tools to create SOA composite applications now. So, why wait?

Keep an eye out for the forthcoming article, "Implementing Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) with Java EE 5" by Gopalan Suresh Raj, Binod PG, Keith Babo, and Rick Palkovic. I'll post a URL on this blog when it's published, around May 25. It provides a detailed SOA composite application example.