Guillaume Nodet's blog

A press release has been published recently on the use of Fuse ESB for the Belgium Government. For french speaking people, you may find lots of informations on the project by browsing Lilian Duchêne's blog . Together with Anne Noseda, we have presented this projet at the BeJUG SOA conference . You can view the slides or download them .

Apache ServiceMix 3.1.2 has been released. Release notes are available here . This is our first official release since graduation: this means that the artifacts are available from the public repositories now (see http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/servicemix/ ).

I'm really pleased to announce that the ASF Board has approved Apache ServiceMix graduation :-) This means that ServiceMix now becomes a full Apache Top Level Project. So we will soon make our first official release of ServiceMix 3.1.2 and 3.2 coming later. This also means that the resource will be moved to their final location: the website will be moved to http://servicemix.apache.org/ and the svn repo to https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/servicemix/. In addition, I'm honored to have been voted as the Apache ServiceMix PMC Chair . The PMC (Project Management Commitee) is the group of people responsible for the project oversight, and its Chair is the interface between the Board and the project. I just want to remind people the purpose of the Apache Incubator : its main responsibility is to watch new projects at the ASF to make sure that no IP problems remains and that there is a vibrant, diverse and sustainable community around the project that goes the "Apache Way...

My company IONA provides support on Apache ServiceMix via a distribution called FUSE ESB available from the Open Source IONA site . What's in FUSE ESB right now? Well, it's roughly a distribution of ServiceMix trunk. This implies that FUSE ESB is released ahead of the Apache ServiceMix distribution (the latest release is 3.1.1, whereas FUSE ESB is based on 3.2). Why are you using the latest trunk instead of the most stable branch? Well, mostly because our customers needs some of the latest features available. We take great care of what is in our Fuse branch: we do not necessarily backport all new stuff from trunk. We may also add some specific customer needs inside our own distribution, features that are not present in the trunk version. So is that a fork? Certainly not :-) We have always supported Apache ServiceMix and we will continue to do so. But our customers have specific needs, so we may need to do custom development or have custom branches for them to fullfill t...

My ThinkPad has some serious cooling problems (it keeps shutting down when I really use it, which is kinda annoying, because this is when you really use it that you want it up and running of course) so I decided to go for a MacBook Pro. Why? Well, I'm a long time users of Windows, but for developing, I usually use cygwin for command line and all the unix good stuff. Additionally, all my team mates are Mac users, so I was quite sure I would not loose much. Now, I must admit I don't regret. Thanks to James for having pointed a few useful softwares ...

Apache ServiceMix 3.1.1 release is finally out! This release is a bug fix version with a few minor improvements.

ServiceMix provides a Service Engine for Drools , the famous Rules Engine. People often want to retrieve data from the rules and such data is usually stored in a database. Previously there was no easy way to configure a DataSource and inject it in the rules definitions. This is a small enhancement that I've just written and that will be included in next major release. So let's say you write your database access code in a simple helper object: import javax.sql.DataSource; import org.springframework.jdbc.core.JdbcTemplate; public class DbHelper { private DataSource dataSource; private JdbcTemplate jdbcTemplate; public void setDataSource(DataSource dataSource) { this.dataSource = dataSource; this.jdbcTemplate = new JdbcTemplate(dataSource); this.jdbcTemplate.afterPropertiesSet(); } public String getSurname(String name) { String surname = (String) this.jdbcTemplate .queryForObject( "select surname from t_...

Loose coupling is a feature that can be easily achieved in JBI but which is sometimes not well understood by newbies in the JBI world. In JBI, services are exposed inside the bus by JBI components when you deploy a given service onto it. These components can be Service Engines (contain business logic) or Binding Components (handling a specific protocol). The distinction is the key for loose coupling: the service itself it decoupled from the protocols used to access it. This is true for all services accessed from inside the JBI bus, be it internal to the bus or external to it. Let's take an example. You need to write a BPEL process and expose it over SOAP/HTTP, and this process will consume several other services. These services can be inside the JBI bus, accessible via SOAP/HTTP or plain JMS. The important point is that the BPEL process has no knowledge of the protocol and location of these services. How does it work ? The key is the WSDL. A WSDL can be split into two part...

Welcome to this world, Alexandre! My new son was born on May the 30th, weights 3.8 kg and his height is 52 cm.

I have spent some time profiling ServiceMix a bit, and particularly the WSDL-First example from the distribution. Here are the results while running a SOAP UI load tests on the example from the 3.1 distribution and the upcoming 3.1.1 distribution: Version, min, max, avg, last, cnt, tps, bytes, bps, err SMX 3.1, 9, 234, 20.64, 14, 57724, 484.43, 19106644, 159450, 0 SMX 3.1.1, 5, 204, 16.75, 14, 71065, 596.99, 23522515, 196095, 0 The most interesting number is the tps (transaction per seconds) absolute number: roughly 600 transactions per seconds sounds like a reasonable number (this small tests were running on my laptop without any particular tuning on the JVM or ServiceMix configuration) ! The other one is the tpc increase between 3.1 and 3.1.1: 595.99 / 484.43 = 1.2324 which means this sample performances for this sample has been boosted by 23 percents !

For those who don't know all of Maven 's features, I will show how to leverage maven at built-time to easily share run-time properties between service units in ServiceMix . Let's say that you expose a few services over HTTP/SOAP using servicemix-http . If you are building several service assemblies, you will end up having several files containing: <http:endpoint service="test:MyConsumerService" endpoint="myConsumer" role="consumer" locationURI="http://0.0.0.0:8192/Service/" soap="true" soapVersion="1.1" /> You will certainly want all your services to be exposed on the same port, so it can become a bit tedious if you need to change them all, or if you need to change between different work environments (test, production, etc...). When working with several service assemblies at the same time, I would recommend to use a hierachical organiz...

I have just fixed a small bug in ServiceMix (SM-865) and this makes ServiceMix a *very* lightweight ESB. The bare minimum dependencies to run the following example are: servicemix-core servicemix-jbi servicemix-services backport-util-concurrent spring xbean-spring The example I ran is very simple, and of course dependencies need to be added depending on the JBI components you use. Anyway, here is the servicemix.xml file: <beans xmlns:sm="http://servicemix.apache.org/config/1.0" xmlns:test="urn:test"> <sm:container id="jbi" embedded="true"> <sm:activationSpecs> <sm:activationSpec service="test:echo"> <sm:component> <bean class="org.apache.servicemix.components.util.EchoComponent" /> </sm:component> </sm:activationSpec> </sm:activationSpecs> </sm:container> <sm:client id="client" con...

Woohooo ! ServiceMix 3.1 has just been released officially. This is a very important version with tons of new features, enhancements and bug fixes.

Dan Diephouse just blogged about the announcement of a public review of a JMS SOAP binding and IRI scheme from BEA, IBM, Sonic and Tibco. This is a great news for JMS/SOAP interoperability ! He mentioned that the content-type header has a limited value because of the lack of support for very large messages in JMS. While this may be true for some providers, ActiveMQ provides such a feature . Also, I'd like to mention I would have been very happy to have a JMS Binding for non-SOAP WSDLs, like the WSDL2 HTTP Binding. I think it would be even more useful ! Anyway, hopefully ServiceMix will have support for the spec soon ...

Jencks 2.0 has been released. This is a major release because there are lots of incompatibilities, but the main point has been to upgrade to Geronimo 1.2 Transaction Manager, which leads to a much simpler configuration. The release also includes the ActiveMQ Pool from my previous blog entry.