InformIT recently released a two-part interview of Andi Egloff and Keith Babo on Project Fuji and OpenESB. Each part, conducted by Ted Neward, is under 10 minutes and topics covered ranged from value of an ESB and the JBI standard as they are implemented today in OpenESB.

It then gets into how Project Fuji offers to integrate into existing development paradigms and reasons for using OSGi (and how it integrates with JBI). Finally, the discussion focuses on the DSL introduced with project Fuji, a standalone (javacc-based) language to express many powerful integration patterns.

While project Fuji is still a research project, I think it's fair to say that we're hoping that most of the working going on there will become OpenESB 3.0. If you find this interesting, make sure you listen to the monthly OpenESB Innovation Series.

How do Event Processing, Event Stream Processing and Event-Driven Architecture relate to an ESB? Prashant explains in this blog entry and illustrates on an example of fraud detection.

Event driven architecture in Open ESB is enabled by the Intelligent Event Processor (IEP) component.

IEP is a Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Event Stream Processing (ESP) engine and comes with rich set of operators and a nice set of tools to visually handle events. As it plugs into Open ESB it can take advantage of all the external connectivity capabilities to gather and act upon events.

An introduction workshop to IEP is available here

Also check out Serge's blog for further in depth discussions of IEP, CEP and CQL.

An interesting mini talk on Dynamic Networks with JBI is now available in the JavaOne community corner podcasts. Travis Chase from Accenture's National Security Services division details how GlassFish and OpenESB helped them develop a solution that decreases the network set-up time to run an exercise from weeks to minutes.

The team developed and contributed several components to the community to achieve this, including the XMPP, SIP and RSS binding components; plus they leveraged several others of the 30+ components available in the OpenESB community. The strong web service capabilities of GlassFish were used to define the business logic on the ESB.

If these components look familiar, we used the same RSS and XMPP components in the Project Fuji screencasts to show how quick and easy it is to route and filter messages between these systems.

With the releases of OpenESB 2.0 and its commercial counter-part JavaCAPS release 6, there's a lot to cover in a user conference.

Horizons conferences have been going on for a little while for SeeBeyond and JavaCAPS users and they now cover topics such as GlassFish, OpenESB, NetBeans and Mural (Open Source Master Data Management).

The EMEA Horizons Conference should cover all of the above topics and be held in Munich, Germany from October 6th to 9th. The Summit (detailed technical sessions) will be held on the first two days while a third day will be dedicated to Hands-on Labs. More details here.

Keith Babo has released a new ten minute screencast on Project Fuji's interceptor feature which intercepts messages as they travel across the NMR (Normalized Message Router) to implement alerts, auditing, validation, security, routing, and many more useful scenarios in a very non-intrusive way.

The interceptor itself is a Java POJO and this screencast goes into what it takes to develop the annotation, build the application and create an OSGi bundle, and finally install and start the interceptor in the Felix runtime. Interceptors are started and stopped independent of the application. Details on the Java @Interceptor annotation are available from this wiki page.

Project Fuji was announced at this past JavaOne and is the next generation OpenESB architecture based on GlassFish v3, OSGi, and JBI. It also features a top-down development language, IFL (Integration Flow Language) briefly shown in a previous screencast. Keep also an eye on the GlassFish Podcast for a Project Fuji presentation by tech lead Andreas Egloff. Previous entries on the topic are marked with the "Fuji" tag.

While standarda such as SAML and XACML provide flexible, interoperable frameworks for exchanging authentication and authorization data, developers are sometimes left wanting something simpler - "Just give me an easy way to authenticate a user and check if they are authorized to access a resource".

We've been working on this in OpenSSO these past few months, building a simple set of identity services; web services for authentication, authorization, attribute retrieval and logging. With SOAP and REST endpoints, just about any application can manipulate identities in a very simple, robust way. Check out Aravindan and Marina's recent article on authentication with identity services. Subscribe to the Sun Developer Network identity feed to catch further article in this series.

In this latest entry of the Stories blog, IBM award-winner IMIXS shares its experience of building human-oriented workflow software using Java EE 5 technologies and the GlassFish application server. This entry and GlassFish Adoption questionnaire discuss the experience moving from older Java technologies together with open sourcing the core features of the WorkFlow engine. If you read German, you may want to check this recent article on the IMIXS/GlassFish combination.

As you would expect from an ISV focused on solving customer business needs, IMIXS plans to offer one-face-to-the-customer contracts with embedded GlassFish support.

Mark is a frequent contributor to the GlassFish mailing lists (posts@USERS) and also a book author. His latest book is titled SOA Using Java Web Services and it is a hands-on programmer's guide to implementing Web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Java EE 5 and Java SE 6. Mark is using GlassFish for his examples, and the book is doing very well, being one of the Top Sellers at JavaOne. Check out the Book's Web Site and TOC. You can buy the book at your favorite local technical bookstore, or online at many places, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Prentice Hall.

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.

A rough cut version of Mark Hansen's new book is now available. This book, "SOA Integration Using Java EE 5 Web Services", is the first detailed guide to building SOA applications with the new Java EE 5 Web Services APIs. Instructions for how to download and configure the sample code with GlassFish appear in Appendix B "Software Configuration Guide". Mark is a content developer for Project GlassFish and he has contributed much of the documentation on web services implementation in 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).