Progress on architecture updates

[marklittle]

Esteban, Arvinder and I have been making good progress on the
migration of the current codebase towards some of our goals with the
original architecture, namely the support for EPRs (thanks to
Arvinder for the schemas) and Messages. This is all in the
'rearchitecture' branch. So far we have agreed on the message
structure: header, context, body, attachment, fault and properties (a
recent addition) and we have support for two external serialization
formats: XML and Java Object Serialization. There is also support for
dynamic serialization via plugins, so if these two implementations do
not match user requirements they can change them. Plus, common has
been renamed rosetta!

All of the new code has been tested via Unit tests and QA tests and
we've worked to keep the code coverage high. However, so far we have
not integrated this new code with the ESB, i.e., it's really just a
parallel development within the same source tree. Making the existing
Rosetta code use the new Message and EPR approach is next on the
list, although from speaking with Esteban it looks like we may need
to merge some of Tom's recent changes into the branch first.

My intention is that once we have moved the listener and action
framework to use the Message and EPRs, we'll merge the branch into
the trunk and everyone can work with the new approach. Meanwhile,
we'll then start work on adding in the dispatchers. With any luck,
that addition will be slightly easier to make than what we've been
doing.

[kurtstam]

Mughdo and I have been working on a registry design and implementation.
We have explored two types
of registries, ebXML and UDDI (see also the wiki:
http://labs.jboss.com/portal/index.html?ctrl:cmd=render&ctrl:window=default.wiki.WikiPortletWindow&page=Jbossesb%2FJAXR&language=EN)
and have looked at one JAX-R implementation (Scout).

You will be able to interact with the registry service in the ESB using
the JAX-R API. A bootstrap process
determines to what XML-Registry you are actually talking to, and what
protocol is used (SOAP, RMI, local calls).
So you can configure the ESB to use an existing XML repository. However,
out of the box, we need our own repository.
An embedded XML-Registry is the lightest possible implementation (no
SOAP stack). Since JBossAS already
picked jUDDI as their XML-Registry, it seemed a good option for us to do
the same, if it could support what
we wanted. However we also looked at freebXML. It turned out jUDDI
almost could do what we wanted. We have submitted a patch to scout
(http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SCOUT-18) and a patch to jUDDI
(http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JUDDI-90) to enable the support
local calls. The entire suit of scout unittest runs using the
LocalTransport implementation. It should not be hard to add RMI support.
I'm basically hoping we can simply use some EJB3 annotations in the
classes that currently handle the local transport.

Currently we are working on writing up some stuff on the bootstrap
process, so you should see stuff showing up on the
forum soon. After we have the bootstrap process stuff done, we will
check it in along with the patched scout and juddi jars and a
juddi.properties config file and some ESB specific unittests.

--Kurt