Appendix A. Some Definitions

An enterprise service bus is a concrete implementation of an abstract SOA design philosophy. An enterprise service bus (ESB) has two roles: it provides message routing functionality and allows you to register services. The enterprise service bus that lies at the center of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is called JBoss ESB.

An enterprise service bus deals with infrastructure logic, not business logic (which is left to higher levels). Data is passed through the enterprise service bus on its way between two or more systems. Message queuing may or may not be involved. The ESB can also pass the data to a transformation engine before passing it to its destination.

JBoss Rules is the name of the business rule engine provided as part of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform product.

The soa-users.properties file is where the user accounts and passwords for accessing the SOA Web consoles are stored. Administrators control access to the system by editing this file. Note that the passwords are saved in clear text so for production systems, password encryption should be used instead.

The soa-roles.properties file is where user access privileges are defined. This file uses the following syntax: username=role1,role2,role3. You can assign any number of roles. Note that a user must be assigned the JBossAdmin, HttpInvoker, user, and admin roles in order to be able to log into the server consoles.

run.sh is the shell script the user runs to launch the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. The Microsoft Windows equivalent is run.bat. The script contains the commands needed to start the server with the profile and port binding which the user has specified in the shell. The script is found in the SOA_ROOT/jboss-as/bin directory.

A server profile is a set of pre-determined settings for running the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform in different ways. The following profiles come with the product: all, default, minimal, production, standard and web. They are found in the SOA_ROOT/jboss-as/server/ directory. The user specifies which profile to run when launching the software by using the -c switch. If none is specified, the "Default" profile is used.