Sun Releases Milestone 1 for GlassFish ESB

Today Sun made the public release of Milestone 1 for GlassFish ESB.

"GlassFish ESB is a binary distribution of OpenESB. It consists of subset of the components in OpenESB. Sun will provide commercial support for GlassFish ESB."

GlassFish ESB delivers a lightweight and agile ESB platform that packages the innovation happening with Project OpenESB into a commercially supported, enterprise-class platform. In essence, GlassFish ESB is a binary distribution that combines technology from Project OpenESB, the GlassFish application server and the NetBeans IDE communities into a supported, commercial distribution.

• GlassFish ESB is a binary distribution from the open source bits in OpenESB.
• Sun will support GlassFish ESB just like any other product: it will not just support the latest version, but also older versions. Once released, fixes to GlassFish ESB will be made on a branch behind the firewall and will be merged periodically to the head of the OpenESB code repository. This is an important point for customers who don’t like to continuously upgrade in production.
• Sun will continue to develop in open source on the OpenESB head.
• GlassFish ESB will be released on Dec 5th; there will be two more milestone releases in between.
• The GlassFish ESB site will soon live on sun.com. There are a few pages for GlassFish ESB on OpenESB just temporarily. We’re trying to separate the commercial aspects (i.e. GlassFish ESB) from OpenESB as much as possible: OpenESB is and should remain an open source community.
• The GlassFish ESB downloads will remain on OpenESB because the bits are being developed in Open Source.
• This does not change anything for the ESB Suite, MDM, and JavaCAPS: we will continue to develop them. There is and will remain a value differentiation between GlassFish ESB and the other products.
• There will be separate component releases next to GlassFish ESB. E.g. IEP will release soon as a separate component.
  

Main Features

• A flexible platform supporting multiple architectural styles (SOA, EJB, MoM, BPM)
• Modular architecture enabling a tailored solution platform for specific project and enterprise needs.
• Leading SOA and WS-* (WS-IT/Metro) support with industry leading interoperability with other platforms
• Integration tooling, based on the award-winning NetBeans IDE with integrated service development, deployment and testing
• Support for JBI, Java EE 5 and a wide range of other key industry standards
• Based on fully open communities Project OpenESB, GlassFish and NetBeans
• Backed by Sun's software support services
• Backed by a large and growing community with an exciting roadmap and future vision
  

Learn more

• Full list of components and standards supported.
• Feature comparison with other other Sun products.

What BPEL stands for?

I have been involved in several projects where one recurring request was to "use BPEL", or more generically "to implement some level of Business Process Management (BPM)". BPEL means Business Process Execution Language and the OASIS Standard defines it as:

"WS-BPEL provides a language for the specification of Executable and Abstract business processes. By doing so, it extends the Web Services interaction model and enables it to support business transactions. WS-BPEL defines an interoperable integration model that should facilitate the expansion of automated process integration in both the intra-corporate and the business-to-business spaces."

An extended definition of SOA says:

"Service-oriented architectures (SOA) promise to implement composite applications
that offer location transparency and segregation of business logic. Location
transparency allows consumers and providers of services to exchange messages
without reference to one another’s concrete location. Segregation of business logic
isolates the core processes of the application from other service providers and
consumers."
(from: Implementing Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) with the Java EE 5 SDK - Sun Microsystems)

So basically BPEL allows to segregate business logic into pieces of reusable sequences of atomic business activities, expressed through an XML syntax. SeeBeyond and Sun JavaCAPS 5.1 supported the BPEL 1.x standard through the eInsight engine, while the new, opensource Sun OpenESB supports BPEL 2.0., but there are of course many other products from different vendors.

However the point is that BPEL is about "segregation of business logic", it is not about "arrow and boxes programming". I underline this because I am seeing many projects where BPEL is very misused and abused: they are kind of replacing Java with BPEL because the latter is more buzzword-oriented and all those arrows and boxes look nicer. But then it happens that resulting BPEL is just polluted by technical activities, while I'm stressing the fact it should contain pure business logic. So my hint is to always put your orthogonal concerns (logging, error handling, auditing, etc...) somewhere else and leave your BPEL as clean as possible. For example, with OpenESB (commercially aka JavaCAPS 6) there is a nice JavaEE-SE which is the JBI Service Engine to execute EJBs (practically, it is a JBI bridge to the below application server). Here is a list of all JBI components you can use, have a look at Aspect SE, Camel SE (Apache Camel Service Engine) and Scripting SE for other very interesting opportunities to avoid messing-up your business logic...