5 Replies Latest reply on Dec 6, 2007 1:55 PM by marklittle

    Is Jboss ESB the solution to this problem?

    magoicochea

      Hello

      I'm writing this because one of the clients on the company where I work has asked us for a solution to a problem they have.

      The customer is a company that has presence in a lot of countries of the world. They usually purchase small agencies in other countries to expand their business.

      However, there is always conflict when they try to implement their system on the recently bought agencies because they already have theirs working and they are used to it. Nevertheless, the agencies always "succumb" to the pressure from the owners.

      Nevertheless, one of those generated a lot of revenue, so they desisted from dropping their AS400 system and use the system that is used worldwide by the company (In part because the system did not have a module that is vital for them). There have been always problems integrating both systems and now that agency wants to integrate their seven systems (which seem to be isolated) with the main system.

      They want to create a system that "orchestrates" the communication between them. After hearing this, SOA came to my mind as the most logical solution.

      One example of what we want to do is the following:

      The main system and the system from that agency generate the same document, but they are stored on a different ways (databases of the two systems were modeled on a different way). What they want is to have them synchronized (not in real time, but documents generated in one system will have to be eventually saved in the other).

      This is just an example, the client is thinking on a scalable solution that will serve them to integrate other systems easily.

      I would like to know if Jboss ESB is what I really need and what tools are available for SOA development. If Jboss ESB is not the solution, which product of Jboss may be the right one?

      THanks

        • 1. Re: Is Jboss ESB the solution to this problem?
          sebcio

          Hi,

          sounds like a material for a success story :-) Ok, I was only joking. I think is pretty good scenario to use JBossESB. We're using in project ESB for very similar scenario (apps are not spread over the world, but only in Germany). JBoss suits your your requirements very well: action fired on some events, wired then to some processing chains.

          Let me show out real world example: system A generates a report, we get this via FTP-Gateway, event is fired. In this event we're checking and parsing data, after this two actions we store them on remote data warehouse system (system B), making in next actions an update in two other systems (C and D) in last action we're sending processing acknowledge to system A. This is only example for one processing chain. We use FTP, File Gateways, also providing and consuming WS and exposing queues outside. Works pretty well with JBoss.

          I think, it's worth to check it out...

          Sebastian

          • 2. Re: Is Jboss ESB the solution to this problem?
            magoicochea

            Sebastian,

            Thanks for your feedback, and yes it kinda looks like a potential success story, but only time will tell, we are just going to elaborate a proposal. I've been looking with my teammate the documentation and we are going to try the examples soon to learn more about jboss ESB, what really surprised me is that jboss ESB documentation so far seems very good unlike other jboss documentation.

            • 3. Re: Is Jboss ESB the solution to this problem?
              marklittle

              You should be able to accomplish what you want with JBossESB. However, nice WYSIWYG tooling is something we lack at the moment: you may need to get "down and dirty" with XML in the short term.

              • 4. Re: Is Jboss ESB the solution to this problem?
                magoicochea

                Can Red Hat Developer Studio provide any help? I know it supports jBPM, but I don't know about the rest.

                • 5. Re: Is Jboss ESB the solution to this problem?
                  marklittle

                  There is no additional support for ESB in RHDS at this stage. That's something we hope to address next year.