Chapter 1. Preface

In order to provide a dynamic and competitive business infrastructure, it is crucial to have a service-oriented architecture in place that enables your disparate applications and data sources to communicate with each other with minimum overhead.

The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a framework capable of orchestrating business services without the need to constantly reprogram them to fit changes in business processes. By using its business rules and message transformation and routing capabilities, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform enables you to manipulate business data from multiple sources.

As you may already know, a hardware bus is a physical connector that ties together multiple systems and subsystems. If you use one, instead of having a large number of point-to-point connectors between pairs of systems, you can simply connect each system to the central bus. An enterprise service bus (ESB) does exactly the same thing in software.

The ESB sits in the architectural layer above a messaging system. This messaging system facilitates asynchronous communications between services through the ESB. In fact, when you are using an ESB, everything is, conceptually, either a service (which, in this context, is your application software) or a message being sent between services. The services are listed as connection addresses (known as end-points references.)

It is important to note that, in this context, a "service" is not necessarily always a web service. Other types of applications, using such transports as File Transfer Protocol and the Java Message Service, can also be "services."

These are the key components of a service-oriented architecture:

The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a framework for developing enterprise application integration (EAI) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions. It is made up of an enterprise service bus (JBoss ESB) and some business process automation infrastructure. It allows you to build, deploy, integrate and orchestrate business services.

The service-oriented architecture (SOA) consists of three roles: requester, provider, and broker.

The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform provides a comprehensive server for your data integration needs. On a basic level, it is capable of updating business rules and routing messages through an Enterprise Service Bus.

The heart of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is the Enterprise Service Bus. JBoss (ESB) creates an environment for sending and receiving messages. It is able to apply “actions” to messages to transform them and route them between services.

There are a number of components that make up the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. Along with the ESB, there is a registry (jUDDI), transformation engine (Smooks), message queue (HornetQ) and BPEL engine (Riftsaw).

The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform's JBossESB component supports:

Furthermore, the ESB allows you to integrate legacy systems in new deployments and have them communicate either synchronously or asynchronously.

In addition, the enterprise service bus provides an infrastructure and set of tools that can:

JBoss SOA simplifies tasks by designating tasks to be performed universally across all systems it affects. This means that the user does not have to configure the task to run separately on each terminal. Users can connect systems easily by using web services.

Businesses can save time and money by using JBoss SOA to delegate their transactions once across their networks instead of multiple times for each machine. This also decreases the chance of errors ocurring.

Acme Equity is a large financial service. The company possesses many databases and systems. Some are older, COBOL-based legacy systems and some are databases obtained through the acquisition of smaller companies in recent years. It is challenging and expensive to integrate these databases as business rules frequently change. The company wants to develop a new series of client-facing e-commerce websites, but these may not synchronise well with the existing systems as they currently stand.

The company wants an inexpensive solution but one that will adhere to the strict regulations and security requirements of the financial sector. What the company does not want to do is to have to write and maintain “glue code” to connect their legacy databases and systems.

The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform was selected as a middleware layer to integrate these legacy systems with the new customer websites. It provides a bridge between front-end and back-end systems. Business rules implemented with the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform can be updated quickly and easily.

As a result, older systems can now synchronise with newer ones due to the unifying methods of SOA. There are no bottlenecks, even with tens of thousands of transactions per month. Various integration types, such as XML, JMS and FTP, are used to move data between systems. Any one of a number of enterprise-standard messaging systems can be plugged into JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform providing further flexibility.

An additional benefit is that the system can now be scaled upwards easily as more servers and databases are added to the existing infrastructure.

Cost reduction can be achieved due to the implementation of services that can quickly communicate with each other with less chance of error messages occurring. Through enhanced productivity and sourcing options, ongoing costs can be reduced.

Information and business processes can be shared faster because of the increased connectivity. This is enhanced by web services, which can be used to connect clients easily.

Legacy systems can be used in conjunction with the web services to allow different systems to "speak" the same language. This reduces the amount of upgrades and custom code required to make systems synchronise.