Building SOA-Based Composite Applications Using NetBeans IDE 6
May 1, 2010 by BPELforum · 5 Comments
Product Description
In Detail
Composite applications aid businesses by stitching together various componentized business capabilities. In the current enterprise scenario, empowering business users to react quickly to the rapidly changing business environment is the topmost priority. With the advent of composite applications the `reuse’ paradigm has moved from the technical aspect to the business aspect. You no longer re-use a service. You re-use a business process. Now enterprises can define their own behaviors optimized for their businesses through metadata and flows. This business process composition has become increasingly important for constructing business logic.
The ability of composite applications to share components between them nullifies the distinction between actual applications. Business users should be able to move between the activities they need to do without any actual awareness that they are moving from one domain to another.
The composite application design enables your company to combine multiple heterogeneous technologies into a single application, bringing key application capabilities within reach of your business user. Enterprises creating richer composite applications by leveraging existing interoperable components increase the organization’s ability to respond quickly and cost-effectively to emerging business requirements.
While there are many vendors offering various graphical tools to create composite applications, this book focuses on using the BPEL service engine from the OpenESB project for solving business integration problems. Project OpenESB implements an Enterprise Service Bus runtime using Java Business Integration (JBI) as the base. This allows easy integration of web services to create loosely coupled enterprise-class composite applications.
The objective of this book is to help enterprise application architects and developers to understand various SOA tools available as part of the NetBeans IDE that will enable them to build an enterprise-grade, scalable application in a short period using a single development interface. The NetBeans SOA tools form an open-source and freely available add-on to the NetBeans IDE that is targeted for enterprise application development. This pack contains open-sourced features from Sun’s Java Studio Enterprise and Java CAPS products, as well as all-new features for creating composite applications, BPEL-based web services, secure Java EE web services, and real-world XML artifacts like XML Schema and WSDL. Part of NetBeans Enterprise Pack is integrated with NetBeans 6.0, so you don’t need to download additional add-ons or plug-ins if you are using NetBeans version 6.0 or higher. However, not all OpenESB components are integrated with NetBeans 6.0. For instance you may not be able to create an Intelligent Event Processor using the standard NetBeans IDE; these components can be downloaded and installed into the NetBeans IDE.
What you will learn from this book?
- Basic understanding of SOA and BPEL Processes
- Setting up NetBeans IDE, OpenESB runtime, and BPEL engine
- Designing BPEL processes
- Packaging and deploying BPEL processes
- JBI runtime and GlassFish Application Server.
- Using the JBI service engine in NetBeans
- OpenESB Binding Components, Service Engines, and other tools
- Using the WSDL Editor for enterprise applications
- Rapid development and testing with the XML schema designer
- Working with the Intelligent Event Processor (IEP) module and the IEP Service Engine
- Fault handling within a BPEL process
Approach
This book introduces basic SOA concepts and shows how you can use NetBeans and OpenESB tools to design and deploy composite applications. After introducing the SOA concepts, you are introduced to various NetBeans Editors and aids that you need to understand and work with for designing a composite application. For example you are introduced to a WSDL editor before dealing with web services. The last part of the book deals with a full-fledged incremental example on how you can build a complex composite application with key screenshots accompanied by the source code available on the website.
Who this book is written for?
This book is for enterprise developers and architects interested in using NetBeans IDE and OpenESB tools to build their SOA based applications.
Building SOA-Based Composite Applications Using NetBeans IDE 6
I rated this book one star only because Amazon’s rating system does not allow zero stars. This book fails on almost every level. The language is exceptionally poor (many “sentences” are not even that!), terms are used without explanation or reference, ideas and concepts are strung together in a seemingly stream-of-consciousness manner, and the examples are poorly crafted and often not relevant to the matter they purport to illustrate. Incomprehensible sentences (”SOA always emphasizes on distributed architecture spanning multiple web services and applications that are part of a different heterogeneous category of applications.”) appear cheek-by-jowl with banal platitudes (”A business process is the procedure that an organization uses to achieve a larger business goal.”) This book brings to mind what those proverbial thousand chimpanzees typing randomly on a thousand typewriters might produce in a thousand days. Then again, I think they might do better. If you really need to learn the NetBeans IDE 6, look elsewhere. Don’t let these “authors” make a monkey out of you!
Rating: 1 / 5
I was originally going to buy this book from Amazon, however it did not contain a preview, nor was I satisfied with the single review that was posted to-date. So I ran down to my local bookstore and found a copy. Right away I could tell this is one of those books that are tossed together quickly as it has the typical suspect large fonts and filler half-page size screenshots. I was able to read most of what I needed in an hour sitting in the bookstore. It’s just a short tutorial on the NetBeans IDE. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of other book offerings for developing SOA using NetBeans.
Rating: 2 / 5
I bought this book after struggling with Open Source ESBs in action. I was interested in learning JBI and servicemix, but I found Open Source ESBs in action to be difficult to read as it constantly alternates between mule and servicemix. This netbeans book is much easier to read, and got me started with openesb in no time. The book is a bit thin, but there is extensive online documentation to jump into when more depth is needed.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book provides a good and quick introduction to OpenESB, the open source ESB for SOA & Integration. The first few chapters provide an overview of the basic building blocks of a composite application: it introduces terms such as service unit, service assembly, etc. The author does a good job explaining the architectural concepts.
The book introduces the different components in OpenESB and a quick explanation on how to use them.
Next is a more in-depth explanation of how the BPEL editor works. BPEL is an important component in OpenESB for orchestrating message flows.
The goal of this book is clearly not to explain the basics of SOA, or how to apply SOA principles in practice. However, it does provide a good introduction to OpenESB.
I enjoyed reading this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
There’s a fair amount here, in terms of the topics covered. What is significant may well vary with the reader. The book starts with a quick rundown on SOA and BPEL. But if you need more details on those, consult texts dedicated to them. Hopefully, to make sense of this book, you’re already well versed in SOA and BPEL.
Both have received attention for several years. However, looking at books on these, you might be struck by the lack of a user friendly tool to compose a BPEL process out of other processes. That deficiency is addressed here, in the sections on the BPEL Designer. You don’t usually want to edit the raw XML files that define a BPEL process (or a Web Service). The verbosity of XML makes this error prone. Hence the BPEL Designer is a great aid. At a graphical level, the text shows how the Designer lets you easily drag and drop processes, and hook these together, into a new process.
If any of you come from an electrical engineering background, there’s a good analogy. Spice was and is the definitive way to define an electrical circuit, for simulations. At one time, you had to write a text file that defined the elements and linkages in a circuit. Then various GUIs came along in the 80s, that greatly eased the effort. Same here. The BPEL Designer offers the same productivity gains.
There’s more stuff in the book. But this is what caught my eye.
Rating: 4 / 5