JBoss ESB provides a set of transport providers which can be used to communicate with ESB services, otherwise known as ESB-aware endpoints. We have already seen some of these transports in action, while working through the examples in Chapter 3; it is now time to examine them in more detail.

Some of the ESB-aware transport providers can handle execution within a transactional context, which means that any messages sent or received over these transports will be managed by the encompassing transaction. These are the JMS, InVM, and SQL transports. An additional transactional provider is the schedule provider, useful for triggering periodic execution of a pipeline.

It is important to be aware that sending a message over a transactional provider, if done within the context of a transaction, has an effect on the delivery of messages; the message will only be delivered on the transport once the transaction commits.

The File, FTP, FTPS, and SFTP transports are not transactionally aware, any message sent on these transports will be sent immediately.

Let us now include a File and InVM transport in the Chapter5 application.