mike4soa building/testing/scaling Open ESB

In the Open ESB project (and its documentation, examples, wiki pages) there are too many references to .jar files where technically speaking the artifacts are actually misnamed zip files. Even some of the tooling file wizards default to looking for .jar file extension names for artifacts that the JSR-208 specification clearly describes as zip files.

This has lead to some confusion. One customer reasonably asked if he could just add an Open JBI Component .jar file to his classpath (no, since the component archives are actually zip files containing jbi.xml and implementation files).

When using some NetBeans-based tools, I always have to remember to change the file pattern filter from the inappropriate default  *.jar to find a .zip file I’m trying to install or deploy.

Technically, jar files contain class files and can be added to a classpath. JBI archives (components and service assemblies) really should be (named as) zip files, since they almost never can be added to a classpath (I’ll leave it as an exercise how to make a JBI archive actually also usable on a classpath, but I haven’t seen a use-case for this yet).

JBI zip files usually contain nested archives (sometimes also misnamed as .jar files).  In the case of a component installation archive, the nested files are, in fact, .jar files containing the actual component implementation.  However, theoretically they could just contain class files, and these don’t have to be in the standard place for class files within a normal jar file.

For JBI Service Assemblies, the nested Service Unit archives are zip files, generally containing XML.  However, the Service Units can contain anything in addition to the jbi.xml; the rest is specified to be “opaque” to the JBI management layer and only needs to make sense to the target component.  (In rare cases, a Service Unit could contain classes or nested jar files, if it was being deployed to some JBI Binding or Engine that was provisioned somehow via compiled Java instead of XML.)

So, if you create a JBI artifact, try to remember to name it with a .zip file extension.  Please

Category: glassfish esb, jbi, netbeans, open-esb

Some weekly SOA news:

• GlassFish ESB RC1 announced
• Updated Open ESB Component Catalog
• NetBeans 6.5 announced
• Camel SE now supports Apache Camel 1.5
• Changes in the Application Server Market
• Help to plan for an ESB in time for Thanksgiving?

Category: camel se, glassfish, glassfish esb, netbeans, open-esb

Happy Halloween!

Some updated wiki pages and blog posts for the past week:

• Fuji: Interceptor Configuration
  
• GlassFish ESB: User Documentation
• Open ESB (BPEL): Embedding Java calls in xpath expressions
• xVM: Secrets for controlling VirtualBox from the command line

Category: general, glassfish, glassfish esb, open-esb, project fuji

In an attempt to highlight some SOA related news each week, this is the second SOA Friday blog post.

• More kudos for the GlassFish application server
• and for JBI and Glassfish ESB
• The next step in Project OpenESB’s evolution: commercial support
• A new Introduction to GlassFish ESB screencast
• Open ESB Community discussion mentions:  Open-ESB related Sun supported products comparison
• World-Leading Enterprise Application Server Providers Propel OSGi Technology to an Industry-Wide Standard
• Sun unveils open source server virtualisation

(SOA-related how? GlassFish ESB bundles GlassFish v2 and NetBeans SOA tools; future Open ESB work (and GlassFish v3) embrace OSGi, and virtualization is handy for developing/testing ESBs)

Category: glassfish, glassfish esb, virtualbox

From this week’s edition of the Netbeans Weekly Newsletter,

here are a couple of highlights:

1. Under Calendar:
   • Celebrate Software Freedom Day with NetBeans! (September 20)

Under Projects:

• Project OpenESB to Graduate to Open Source with Commercial Support

“Project OpenESB is an Open Source project that is building an ESB that consists of both a runtime and a design time tooling based completely on NetBeans. In the last few years, OpenESB has made important contributions to the NetBeans IDE, for example, the WSDL editor, the CASA editor, the BPEL editor, and more. GlassFish ESB, the first milestone of a commercially supported binary distribution, is now available. The distribution includes NetBeans and adds extra components, such as JAXB based code seeding, a JCA wizard, and more, that are not available in the IDE’s standard downloads.”

You can also subscribe to the newsletter(s).

Category: glassfish esb, netbeans, open source, open-esb

Some Open ESB related news of interest (at least to me) this week:

• milestone 1 download is now available on the Open ESB downloads page (unlike the open-source Open ESB project, commercial support will soon be available from Sun for GlassFish ESB)
• Here are some details about the Open ESB Proxy Binding and Distributed JBI
• Open ESB and Open JBI Components issue trackers are now merged
• Sun Launched xVM this week
  

Category: glassfish esb, open-esb, virtualbox