Another GlassFish-related announcement from Sun (PR): the Open ESB collection of projects are being aligned under the GlassFish umbrella. An evolutionary rather than a revolutionary move as pieces of OpenESB were already included in GF v2, but will encourage further synergies between the groups and artifacts.

Expect bundles of OpenESB components with GF, as well as community and architectural interactions. A good example of the latter is Project Fuji where the ESB components are delivered as OSGi modules running on GlassFish v3.

Check out GlassFish ESB, the earlier TA entry, and Prakah's Introduction to Fuji and GlassFishESB

More teasers out there... check out Andi's note on Java CAPS and Fuji. Project Fuji will be specially interesting to GlassFish; from the Fuji WebSite: [A] lightweight micro-kernel based on JBI (JSR 208) and OSGi. Packaged as an OSGi bundle, the micro-kernel can be installed in any OSGi-compliant runtime.

For full details, check out Andi and Keiths' session on Wednesday at 9:30 am: TS-6385 Integration Profile for GlassFish Project v3

Nice Logo, BTW... :-)

OpenESB is included in the GlassFish App Server, but it is also available separately. OpenESB runs on plain Java SE (see Wiki page) and Mark just announced that it Also Works on JBoss (Wiki page). All OpenESB downloads are Available here. Also see this List of Screencasts related to OpenESB.

One of the many new features for GlassFish v2 is an integrated JBI implementation. Gregg Sporar has done some nice digging on that subject. To get your feet wet, he recommends this resource and the specification's first four chapters.

Since Gregg is a NetBeans evangelist, there's a tooling part of the story. The forthcoming NetBeans Enterprise Pack (version 5.5.1) has new and improved XML and SOA features such as a Service Assembly "casa" editor, graphical WSDL and XSLT editors, and an Intelligent Event Processor.

JBI implementations are listed here, while JBI components and engines are enumerated there. Most of these are Open Source and there are also examples of mix and matching such as this one.

The latest issue of SDN Channel covers SOA and it includes the usual video interviews and resource links. The main download is the Java EE 5 Tool Bundle which includes the Java EE 5 SDK as well as NetBeans and the Open ESB. Also check these Recent Enterprise Pack ScreenCasts and the home page for JavaCAPS, the forthcoming Sun's Java Composite Application Platform Suite. I also find very useful the blogs on Learning BPEL by Gopalan and those on JBI, ESB and SOA by Ron. And thanks to Marina for the tip.

Gopalan has been doing a whole collection of good writeups that would be very useful to learn BPEL. Gopalan is in the team that works on OpenESB (includes JBI); most of his entries relate strictly to BPEL but some address specifically BPEL and JBI. Gopalan, Ron, and John are some of the bloggers I enjoy reading in this area.

Entries on BPEL include:

• What are Correlation, Message Property, Property Alias, and Correlation Set
• What are PartnerLinkTypes, Roles, and PartnerLinks
• The BPEL Mapper
• The BPEL Debugger

Entries on the intersection on BPEL and JBI include:

• The WS-BPEL JBI Service Engine
• The HTTP/SOAP JBI Binding Component
• Insurance Claim Scenario: Orchestration using BPEL and JBI - This is based on J1 TS, see nice review
• Nice Follow-up Article based on the above (Ron's recommendation, TA spotlight).

There is some interesting work going on at NetBeans.org. They are crafting new tools for creating composite applications based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine has posted some screenshots that show some graphical editors for messy XML languages like WS-BPEL 2.0, WSDL 1.1, and XML Schema. These tools make creation of these standard XML documents, and the composite applications they describe, much easier.

The Open ESB project is being integrated with GlassFish. Manisha describes how the Service Engine in GlassFish is used to provide SOAP over JMS. The client and the service code are unaware of the transport used, only the port configuration is changed. Check out Manisha's blog for good details. Ron also provides an Additional Perspective on this effort. Note that the New WS Stack (targetted for the next version of GlassFish) is designed to support multiple transports. That effort is inter-related to this one, so eventually you will also be able to use JMS outside of JBI endpoints.

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a distributed infrastructure where a set of service containers adapt IT assets to a standard model based on XML and Message Exchange Patterns (MEP). The ESB interconnects them with a reliable messaging bus and provides services for transforming and routing messages, as well as administration (see ron's entry or the Wikipedia page). ESBs are popular but they suffer from a lack of standarization, and the JBI specificiation (JSR 208, JBI.next) addresses that problem for the Java Platform. There are a number of JBI-based Implementations; Project OpenESB is the one that we are ensuring works with GlassFish.

Stay tuned for more news on OpenESB and GlassFish, but let us know of other ESB implementations that work with GlassFish.

Ron has a nice blog site talking about things like SOA, JBI and OpenESB. His most recent writeup, Why SOA advocates that SOA should not require new artifacts in the Web Services that are being used.

Ron does a good job of describing JBI and SOA, and he will join us here in TheAquarium to cover that area. We will also cover more of OpenESB as it runs on top of GlassFish, although I hear they are a few releases behind, so we will report after clarifying that.

If you want another voice on JBI, check James Strachan (video, TSS thread).

I finally found a moment to read some of John's entries on SOA and he deserves a (repeat) spotlight. Start by checking out what is a Mashup, then look at a few, say from MonkeyBites like this, this, or this. And then you can go read John's blog on SOA and MashUps... Enjoy!