Introducing JBoss ESB

This news I got from SOA WebServices Journal. On Nov, 20 2006, JBoss announced the release of "JBoss ESB". See the press release here (PDF document).

Some excepts from this announcement:
"...With the addition of JBoss ESB to Red Hat’s arsenal, enterprises now have a complete set of leading, low-cost SOA building blocks for modern applications and the ability to run them on a virtualized Linux platform.
...
“JBoss ESB is the result of a true community effort, from the technology donation that helped accelerate our development timeline to the individual developers who brought their expertise to the project,” said Pierre Fricke, director of product management, JBoss. “This release provides a fundamental building block for our SOA integration platform. As an integrated company, Red Hat and JBoss are focused on delivering the leading open source platform for next-generation computing that drives down infrastructure costs for our customers without compromising on value and choice.”

Here are some key features of JBoss ESB 4.0 include:

• A pluggable architecture enables all JBoss ESB subsystems such as messaging and transformation to be swapped with other alternatives, which gives customers flexibility and choice.
• Support for a variety of messaging services, including secure FTP, HTTP, email and JMS (JBossMQ, JBoss Messaging, IBM MQSeries, and ActiveMQ).
• Transformation engine that bridges data formats for seamless communication, supporting XSLT and Smooks, a flexible alternative.
• Service registry for service discovery and integration, using JAX-R and UDDI.
• Persisted event repository to support governance of the ESB environment.
• Notification service to allow the ESB to register events and signal subscribers.
• Content-based routing based on XPath and JBoss Rules for a more flexible and dynamic alternative to publish-subscribe.
• Gateways that allow non-ESB aware clients to interact with services deployed within the JBoss ESB environment.

SOA: Less Coding = Less Outsourcing?

Coincidence or not, just after the presentation I gave at SUCESU-SP, I found this post on Joe McKendrick's blog.

The question presented at SOA in Action conference (registration required) is: If SOA can reduce the amount of code, so SOA can reduce outsourcing, right?

In my humble opinion, NO. If it's is true that

1. SOA is growing up and it`s present in all to-do list of enterprises (as Joe point out);
2. SOA can, in fact, reduce the coding (reuse, well-define services aligned with business process etc)
3. and that fact that SOA is very attached to business process makes outsourcing more difficult.
   

On the other hand, the simply fact that with SOA:

1. you can "broke" you software in many "pieces" (services)
2. and theses parts of software have a defined interface
   
3. and they uses webservices to communicate and exchange information
4. and, beginning in its designs, these services have a well-defined scope
5. and, finally, the demand for software will increase,
   

So I can conclude that, with SOA on not, the demand for outsourcing will continue to rise.

SOA Presentation at SUCESU-SP

Today at SUCESU-SP ("Sociedade dos Usuários de Computadores e Telecomunicações") I (on behalf of Transit Brasil) gave a presentation on "IT Risk Management" seminar. The presentation was about how SOA can reduce the risk in a IT environment: "SOA and BPM reducing risks in IT Outsorcing Process".

Hyperic: Managing your MULE (open source ESB)

MuleSource has announced that will use Hyperic HQ (from Hyperic), as the foundation for its new monitoring and management system, Mule HQ.

Hyperic developes two versions of an Hyperic HQ (IT management platform). One of them, Hyperic HQ, is open source.

According to this press-release,

...The new Mule HQ management tools will be available to MuleSource customers in Q4 2006.

With Mule HQ, enterprises using Mule in production will gain the ability to:

• Monitor and manage Mule instances from a single location
• Achieve integrated log, configuration, and server event tracking
• Auto-Discover Mule servers, associated software and hardware
• Report real-time and historical details of any event generated by any managed resource

About Mule:
Mule (http://mule.mulesource.org) is a Java-based, open source ESB and integration platform that enables enterprise developers to perform a wide variety of integration tasks, from bringing new applications into production, to modernizing legacy applications and platforms, to enabling SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). With hundreds of production deployments worldwide, Mule is the industry’s most battle-tested open source integration approach.

About Hyperic:
Hyperic HQ (http://www.hyperic.org) is the industry’s best and most comprehensive product to manage a software stack in production, whether it's J2EE-based, open source, or a hybrid. An extensible system, Hyperic HQ monitors virtually all kinds of operating systems, web servers, app servers and database servers, and can be extended to monitor most types of applications—both at a technical and business level.

See here the server and the agent architetcure.

Back to Blogger!

After a few months with no update now I'm back. I am writing this post from my iMac using the Blogger widget. Simply amazing.... ...Another reason I did not post any notes was the born of my son, Pedro. He has already a blog (http:pedrofcarvalho.blogspot.com). Keep reading!