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2006

Mark Little's Blog

August 2006 Previous month Next month

 

I blogged a while back about our acquisition of the Rosetta ESB. As mentioned by others, we've made significant progress on our SOA story over the past few months. With the release of JBossESB 4.0 Beta1, we're making another important statement to our customers and community: Redhat+JBoss is a powerful combination in the SOA space.

 

Looking specifically at JBossESB, we spent a lot of time and effort working with customers on our architecture and the Rosetta code donation has helped us to start to deliver on the goals. The fact that it has been in production use for 3 solid years is a critical component in the solution for our customers. It has a pedigree associated with it that is impossible to come by any other way: for any software system/application to be solid and reliable, it needs to be deployed, run and tested. This beta release may not be precisely where we want to be, but then what beta release is? It is fair to say that for this release we have concentrated on getting the core right, setting the foundation on which to build the product release. So don't expect lots of bells and whistles, but do expect a good offering.

 

The list of things to look out for in this beta release include:

  • Support for ageneral notification framework. Transports supported include JMS (JBossMQ, JBoss Messaging and MQSeries), email, database or file system.
  • A great trailblazer example. Check this out before doing anything else, as it's a good way to set the scene for the rest of the documentation.
  • Support for data transformations.
  • The concept of a listeners and action model to support loose-coupling of interaction steps. Again, check the trailblazer for how simple this is to use.
  • A durable object repository.
  • High performance and reliability.
  • Built on JBossAS 4.0.4 and EJB3.

 

One thing I definitely don't want to let slip by un-noticed is that this ESB is truly a release build by the community and for the community. We've got a great team, composed of full-time employees as well as community members. The forum has always been active and this has helped us develop the ESB. Many of the forum contributors have subsequently joined the team in one way or another. I have been very impressed with the way in which the team has pulled together in this effort and I think it bodes well for the future!

 

After some delay (JavaOne and JBossWorld being primarily responsible, along with pesky customers!), we've released a new version of JBoss Transactions: 4.2.1. This release includes the first productized version of the Web Services Transactions component. It's still only compliant with the 1.0 versions of the specifications (we're working within the OASIS WS-TX technical committee on updated versions of the specification, which will include new interoperability scenarios) but that's the case for all of the major vendor implementations at this stage. In the past we've demonstrated interoperability with the likes of IBM and Microsoft and are currently going through a re-qualification process.

 

It's worth pointing out that we do not yet support the new JBossWS stack. That's on our roadmap, but is realistically a Q4 2006 or Q1 2007 goal.

 

We used JBoss Transactions at a successful BOF during JavaOne 2006 to demonstrate the requirements for long running transactions. There was a lot of positive feedback and a lot of people were impressed with how simple JBossTS facilitates the development of what can be a complex set of tasks. A similar presentation was given at HP World 2004 and the responses were good then, so it's nice to know we're on the right track and appear to be pleasing most of the people most of the time.

 

If you're interested in seeing what is possible with transactional Web Services, then I'd recommend checking out JBossTS 4.2.1 and looking at the WS-T trailmap. It's based on the well know "travel agency" example and shows how to use both traditional ACID transactions and newer compensation based transactions in the same application. As usual with JBossTS, there are a lot of details in the manuals, so check them out too.

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