Chapter 1. Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works

Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works is a platform for developing enterprise application integration (EAI) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions. It consists of a service component framework, business rules/complex event processing, life-cycle governance, runtime governance and process automation. It is built on the same core as JBoss Fuse with enterprise messaging, Camel and CXF so, therefore, users can use it to design, deploy, integrate and orchestrate business services.

The benefits of using Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works include the following:

Integrating your major business systems into a cohesive infrastructure can be a challenge, especially when you have legacy applications. Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works has a number of ways enable you to integrate both new and legacy applications. Development is simplified with a transparent, lightweight service framework which uses EIP technology. This allows developers to focus on higher order concepts while still working with familiar technologies such as Apache Camel, BPEL, BPMN or POJOs. To reduce the operational costs of production and maintenance, the platform utilizes automatable, content-aware repository and service activity monitoring. These support the entire service lifecycle and development, QA and production teams with run-time and design-time visibility, monitoring and alerting.

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 synchronize 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.

Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works 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 Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works can be updated quickly and easily.

As a result, older systems can now synchronize with newer ones due to the unifying methods of Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works. 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 Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works 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 synchronize.