SwitchYard and OpenShift come together like peanut butter and jelly in our latest episode in the SwitchYard Video Series ...

Getting sick of all these 0.x minor releases of SwitchYard?  Well good news ... we're getting all major up in here with a 1.0.0.Final release!  Truth be told, the bits have been available for weeks now, but we spent some quality time with the tooling and documentation after the runtime was done to make sure 1.0 was done right.

What is SwitchYard?

SwitchYard is a structured framework for developing integration applications using the design principles and best practices of Service Oriented Architecture.  It integrates really well with Apache Camel and JBoss Application Server, providing a runtime based on the best open source integration and application server options out there.  A slightly longer description can be found here.

What's in 1.0?

This was a monster release for the team, with 184 total issues resolved for 1.0.  Here are the most important updates for 1.0:

• The project has changed from LGPL to the Apache License v2.0.
• Camel components not distributed directly with the project can now be added as extension modules to the SwitchYard subsystem, allowing any Camel component, data format, etc. to be added to SwitchYard easily.
• Camel routing services can now configure multiple routes per service.  This allows complex routing logic to be broken up into separate routes and also makes our XML routes play nicely with the Fuse Camel editor.
• HTTP-based gateways (REST, SOAP, HTTP) added support for proxy configuration, basic authentication, and NTLM.
• All gateways have been updated to include support for starting and stopping individual bindings.  This allows you to stop/restart processing on a given endpoint from our admin clients.
• The SOAP Gateway now supports MTOM, SOAP w/ Attachments, and WS-Addressing.
• Generating Java interfaces from WSDL is now supported in the visual editor for all the folks that like to design top-down.
• The JCA gateway has been tested and documented for use with ActiveMQ for message inflow and outbound.
• The SwitchYard admin API has been updated to include JMX support.
• Multi-step transformation is now supported, so if you don't have a transformer to go from A -> C, but you have A -> B and B -> C, then we can get the job done.
• BPM services now support customizable correlation keys so you don't have to pass the process instance id back into the process with each subsequent request.
• Service throttling is now supported to govern throughput for any service.
• We went through the public API with a fine-tooth comb to make it nice and clean.  There will be no backward incompatible changes made to APIs or configuration for 1.x.
• Our tooling gets more beautiful with each release, and this one is no exception. 
• An EAR deployment example has been added to our quickstarts and is now tested as part of our release test suite.
• If you don't want to put clear text passwords in your switchyard.xml, you can use our properties support in combination with the AS 7 password vault to protect that sensitive info.
• Security can now be configured on a global or per-service basis with the addition of named security configs to switchyard.xml.

A list of all the issues that went into 1.0 can be found in JIRA.

Where Do I Get This Goodness?

The SwitchYard Downloads page has all the SwitchYard bits and pieces.  I highly recommend following the Installation Guide to install the runtime and tooling.  The guides are short, moderately useful, and 67% free of spelling and grammatical errors.

How Do I Learn More?

• Check out the SwitchYard Documentation which contains a whole bunch of useful stuff.
• Watch some awesome videos and learn all about SwitchYard in our new SwitchYard Video Series.
• Take a gander at our Quickstart applications.  Run them as is and see SwitchYard in action.  Or change some stuff and see what blows up.

We're trying something new in the SwitchYard project with our most recent release.  The team has created a new video series which is focused on helping new users get started with the project and for existing users to gain a deeper understanding of SwitchYard features and capabilities.  There are three guiding principles for the series:

• Live Action : each video provides a live demonstration of a SwitchYard concept or feature.  The idea is to complement the documentation through live action and provide additional context where it's needed.  (N.B. : we violate this rule in the very first episode which is more of a trail map than a demonstration).
• Informal : to a certain extent, quantity is better than quality here.  We're gonna make them useful, but we won't spend much time doing 1000 takes or polishing the videos in post-production.  That said, I have submitted an expense request for celebrity cameos in the videos.
• Community-Focused : we belted out six videos right away based on what we thought might be useful.  Where we go from here is something we would like our community to decide.  If you have burning questions or areas where you feel a demonstration would really add to the documentation, please let us know in the forums or file a JIRA.  Here's an example request.

All of the videos can be found on the SwitchYard Video Series page.  Here's one of the videos in the series to see what they are all about:

SwitchYard 0.6 has gone final and is stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey.  The issue bucket for 0.6 was a veritable horn o' plenty, with 157 issues resolved over the course of the release.  Here's a sampling of the features:

• Security policy now supports pluggable authentication providers with PicketLink and PicketBox integration out of the box.
• Transaction policy definitions for starting a global or local transaction around a service.
• Transaction policy on service references allow you to declare whether a transaction should be propagated or suspended on invocations from your services.
• Clustering of SY instances.
• A remote service invoker.
• A ton of work around improving the visual editor and adding support for new features in 0.6.
• Added a RESTEasy gateway.
• Added a vanilla HTTP gateway.
• Added dynamic operation selectors which allows the service operation to be derived from message content/context.
• Operation-level drill down for service monitoring.
• Enhancements to the rules and bpm components around fact insertion and event notification.
• Easy peasy deployment and testing of quickstarts.
• Improved Camel integration in core and test framework.

If you'd like to learn more, check out the latest edition of our critically acclaimed Release Overview series for details, examples, and links to additional information.

Cheers,

The SwitchYard Team

Looks like the SwitchYard presentations from JUDCon Boston are now available.   I posted the slides to the blog some time back, but the video helps fill in the blanks and also includes live demo action.  If you want to see the absolute latest and greatest, check out the SwitchYard session during JBoss Integration Week tomorrow at 1:00pm ET.

Future of the Enterprise Service Bus at JBoss

Enterprise Services Made Easy with SwitchYard

SwitchYard had a good showing at both JUDCon and JBoss World this year.  Our presentations were well received, feedback was tremendous, and all of our live demos worked. :-)  If you weren't able to make it this year or you want a refresher, here's the collection of SY presos:

The Future of the Enterprise Service Bus at JBoss

Tom and I gave a talk on what we're up to with JBoss ESB and SwitchYard, where things are headed in the future, and tips on how to make the transition.

Enterprise Services Made Easy with SwitchYard

An introduction to SwitchYard with a healthy amount of show-and-tell.

SOA at Scale with SwitchYard

An examination of the different elements of scaling an enterprise application (it's about more than runtime performance) and how SwitchYard can help.

The first two sessions were recorded via video camera and the last was recorded via screen capture.  I haven't seen the videos posted yet by the production team, but hopefully that will go up soon.  All three sessions had demos and cheesy jokes and it's just not the same if you can't watch/listen to those while looking at the slides. 

0.5 Beta 1 bits have been posted to our Downloads page.  There are 113 issues resolved in 0.5 (so far).  I'm working on a revamped Getting Started guide and Release Overview for 0.5 Final, which should drop in a couple weeks.  In the meantime, this is a great time to kick the tires and help us improve things for Final.  Here are some useful links:

• 0.5.0 Beta 1 bits
• Eclipse Tooling Installation
• Overall Documentation Home

Lots and lots of stuff in this release, but I would have to say that our new visual application editor makes the biggest impact. 

We've received some great feedback at JUDCon this week and we're looking forward to people trying the Beta build and giving feedback that we can fold into 0.5 Final and 0.6.  So please get your hands dirty and let us know what you think!