Can ESB just be used for consuming services?

[venuwin1]

Hi,

We need to build a consumer platform for a variety of merchant sites. Merchant sites may provide us SOAP based webservices for consumption, RESTful services or just JMS queue where we have to post our message and get the response.

The idea here is that our consumer system has to interact with various kinds of services that can be webservices, JMS,MQ etc. How do we build a system to make use of a variety of producers whist still having a single system at our end which can handle the foresaid variety of producers?

If ESB can be used to build a client system(consumer) for catering to a wide range of merchants(varying in the way they expose the services), does Jboss ESB support it?

Reasons why i ask here the question is:

1. I am new to this SOA space and ESB.

2. ESB seems to be more producer centric. I mean - if i have to expose some service, i can expose via JMS,MQ,SOAP,REST etc. But my need is the reverse. The merchants can expose any kind of service. I need to be flexible to consume any kind of service.

Please advise.

Thanks

Venu

[h.wolffenbuttel]

Hi,

Apart from JBoss is an ESB exactly that what you are looking for. Hence is the answer to your question: YES! The JBoss ESB works with producers and services, where the producers are your gateway to interact with all kind of transports. The services are action pipelines which can transform your message and put it on another transport when necessary. Download JBossESB 4.7 and look at the quickstarts on how to use it. Don't forget to checkout the wiki (http://community.jboss.org/wiki/) which has more specific information.

Regards,

Hans

[venuwin]

That answers my question. Thanks..

[amandal]

Please mark the question as answered.

Thanks,

Aps

[venuwin]

Hi,

Please let me know how to mark this answered. I searched for an option for the same, could not find it. Please help.

Thanks

Venu