I've been looking into some of these for a while now (ServiceMix, as
well as others that have existed over the years). The basic problem
is: what will we do with them?
Usually an ESB is used within an organization to integrate various
applications by trying to get all of the applications to talk to the
ESB. OFBiz would just be one of those applications. It would be great
to make sure we could talk effectively to ServiceMix and/or other
ESBs, but of less value to actually include ServiceMix into OFBiz.
In short we want to work well with ESBs, but if an organization needs/
wants an ESB then they will probably choose than independently of
whatever OFBiz or any other application offers. In other words, it is
of more value to work with a variety of ESBs than to include any.
On a related note, if want ServiceMix compatibility we should do that
without any ServiceMix libraries. The whole point is loose coupling,
and if we get working well with ServiceMix in a loosely coupled way
we'll have a better chance of working well with other app servers.
One interesting project we may want to include in OFBiz in order to
work better with external service environments is CXF. It has
libraries for exposing services with a wide variety of standards
support, and for consuming services available from a wide variety of
standards. The only question I had based on limited research of it was
whether or not we could interact with it at a low enough level to be
able to automatically expose Service Engine services in a variety of
ways, and also map incoming service calls of various types of OFBiz
Service Engine services (like we do with XML-RPC and to some extend
with Axis for SOAP).
-David
On Jan 8, 2009, at 9:49 AM, Adrian Crum wrote:
Anil sent out an email some time ago with the subject "Application
framework technology set" in which he started a discussion on new
technologies that could be used in OFBiz. One of the technologies
mentioned - Enterprise Service Bus - received several "+1"
responses, so I thought I would get the discussion started on that
one technology.
Apache's ServiceMix was suggested as one solution to implementing
ESB. Should we start looking at that? Or are there other
alternatives that would be better?
Does anyone have experience using ESB who would be willing to
coordinate the integration effort?
I'm willing to help with this effort. Is anyone else available?
-Adrian
