Morning of portal and web services
by Karsten Wade
This morning I attended Thomas Huete’s introduction to JBoss Portal while capturing the full audio of Mark Proctor giving an Introduction to JBoss Drools and the Business Rules Management System (BRMS). Then before the morning break I sat in and captured Introduction to Web Services by Heiko Braun.
In general, the sessions continue to follow a similar format. Full room, interested attendees, and questions regarding their real world situations. Lot’s of usage of JBoss Tools/JBoss Developer Studio for demonstrations. Speakers who really know their subject material, pulling together really great presentations, with real learning. Let’s not talk about the technical difficulties, m’kay?
During Heiko’s talk on web services, I took some notes that I’ll post here. (Any mistakes are my error or ignorance.) Later, when the audio and slides are available, this session will be one of a handful that we post the full audio. I’m very interested in how useful these full audio sessions are to you all. For one thing, that helps me in planning for future JBoss Worlds, knowing what you are interested in and what to skip.
The JBoss Web Services (JBossWS) was more than an intro. Heiko focused on the latest of what has been happening with JBossWS 3.0, recently released on 11 February. Heiko pointed out one of the reasons JBossWS is called a framework is, in addition to holding JBoss Native, it can also hold other JAX-WS compliant web services, namely Sun Metro and Apache CXF. In fact, Metro and CXF support are features of the 3.0 release.
As a framework, JBossWS has an explicit focus on maintaining the user experience regardless of the stack deployed inside. The goal is to keep the tooling, programming models, deployment, and management consistent regardless of which stack you choose. This way you can choose a stack by its features without having to overly impact your development.
In addition, there is an SPI layer that decouples the web service stacks from the target container, improving plugability across target containers (currently JBoss Application Server 5.0, 4.2, and 4.0). This focus on portability is why the web stacks that can be used in the framework must be JAX-WS certified.
The nature of the web services field is that different stacks support different WS extensions. By pulling all these separate stacks into one framework, developers get to choose their web services stack by features and merit. Heiko showed quotes from Metro and CXF leaders in support of what JBoss WS is doing.
JBoss WS Native stack focuses on enterprise reliability, featuring:
- JavaEE certifid JAX-WS
- J2EE certified JAX-RPC
- Attachment support with XOP and SwA
- JMS Transport
- WS-Addressing
- WS-Security
- WS-Policy
- WS-Eventing
- WS-Reliable Messaging (coming very soon)
The inclusion of more WS-* extensions is dependent on when the JBossWS team has tests, QA, and documentation.
Heiko touched upon a roadmap for JBossWS, which included:
- WS-ReliableMessaging for JBossWS-Native - Q1
- More samples and tutorials
- Especially WS-* (WS-Trust,WS-TX, etc.)
- Tooling: IDE integration, CXF tools
- WS project generator, similar to ’seamgen’
Please give your feedback to the 3.0 release and the roadmap in the appropriate forums, such as the project JIRA.