Congratulations! You now have an understanding of JBoss's history, open source software and JBoss projects and products, Service Oriented Architecture and the role of an ESB in it, as well as a good idea of how JBoss ESB fits into SOA, and the level and types of support that are provided to you in the JBoss ESB community.
The chapters in this book will enable you to work hands-on with JBoss ESB as you learn how to build, deploy, and administer your own ESB services. Each chapter builds on what you learned in the previous chapter.
The chapters cover the following subjects:
Chapter 1, Getting Started
In this chapter, you begin to get hands-on with JBoss ESB. When you complete this chapter, you'll have JBoss ESB downloaded, deployed to an application server, and running. This chapter describes the JBoss ESB distributions that are available, how you decide which distribution is right for you and how you can download it. After you download JBoss ESB, this chapter walks you through the steps you take to deploy JBoss ESB to a JBoss AS server, and how to start the server. Once you have the server running, this chapter shows you how to verify that the server is running correctly with JBoss ESB. And, if there are problems with the server or the deployment of JBoss ESB to that server, this chapter shows you how to debug these problems.
Chapter 2, Deploying your Applications to the ESB
Once you have JBoss ESB deployed to an application server and running, it's time to learn how to deploy and manage deployed services. You'll learn how to do that in this chapter by using one of JBoss ESB's "quickstart" example programs. This chapter starts by reviewing the core components of JBoss ESB, how they work and how your services can use them. The chapter then describes "ESB-awareness." This concept is important to understand as it defines how you can "onboard" messages onto the ESB through gateways from external sources. After this, you get hands on with the JBoss ESB quickstart example programs; how you build, deploy, and run the quickstarts, and how they illustrate JBoss ESB features. Finally, this chapter introduces the eclipse based JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS). JBDS makes service development easier for you through its IDE-based ESB editor and makes it easier for you to deploy and administer deployed services.
Chapter 3, Understanding Services
Running a simple service is a useful first step, but in this chapter, you'll expand on that by learning in-depth about services and how they perform tasks with the actions pipeline, and how services are able to support transactions. The chapter also shows how services can be made secure by using authentication and authorization, and how services can be executed based on schedules that you define. You'll also learn how to make your services more robust with load-balancing, fail-over and fault-tolerance configuration.
Chapter 4, Understanding Actions
Actions enable your services to perform simple and complex tasks. This chapter shows you how to use the built-in actions provided with JBoss ESB. These actions support JBoss ESB's core functions of transformation, routing, and support for web services, and JBoss ESB's integrations to use Business Process Management with jBPM, Rules services with Drools, BPEL processes with Riftsaw, and virtual databases with Teiid. The chapter also shows you how to create and debug your own custom actions.
Chapter 5, Preparing for Message Delivery on the Service Bus
One of the major features of JBoss ESB is how it is able to deliver messages to services. In this chapter you'll learn how to use connectors to get messages onto and off of the JBoss ESB bus. You'll also learn how JBoss ESB uses message transport providers and how to configure them. This chapter describes how you use the transports that the ESB supports in your services, and how transactions, security, pass-by-value and pass-by-reference get affected with such transports. The transports covered include JMS, JCA, file, ftp, sftp, ftps, sql.
Chapter 6, Gateways and how to integrate with External Clients
In addition to moving messages over the ESB between services, it's important for the ESB to be able to "on-board" messages from external sources. JBoss ESB does this with Gateways. This chapter shows you how to write clients and then use gateways to enable your services to receive ESB unaware messages through gateways from those clients. The chapter also shows you how to use notifiers to send messages off the JBoss ESB bus to external ESB unaware destinations.
Chapter 7, How the ESB Uses the Registry to Keep Track of Services
How does JBoss ESB keep track of deployed services? In a registry. In this chapter you'll learn how the registry works, and how to extend the the default operations performed by the service registry. This chapter introduces you to the UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) protocol and shows how your clients can use it to locate services. The chapter also introduces you to federated registries, where you can segment your services into hierarchical groupings, and shows you steps that you can take to maintain your service registry to keep it running reliably.
Chapter 8, Integrating Web Services with the ESB
In this chapter you'll learn how to take your ESB services and export them over SOAP/HTTP and about the choices available for invoking local and remote web services. This chapter shows you how to automatically expose ESB services through a web service with EBWS, invoking co-located web services with SOAPProcessor, invoking remote web services with SOAPClient, and dynamic proxying of web services with SOAPProxy. This chapter concludes by showing you how to integrate web service security with JBoss ESB.
Appendix A, Where to Go Next with JBoss ESB?
This appendix looks into topics like using the JBDS Editor and other UDDI Providers (HP Systinet, SOA Software Service Manager). We will also see Drools and Rules Based Services, RiftSaw and BPEL-based services, jBPM and Business Process Management. Other topics covered include using Maven with JBoss ESB—creating a project from scratch with Maven archetype and using the JBoss Maven plugin and testing ESB Services (TestMessageStore and Arquillian).
Appendix B, Pop-quiz Answers
Check how well you scored in the quizzes.