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Created by kcbabo on Dec 7, 2011 10:45 AM. Last modified by kcbabo on Dec 7, 2011 7:31 PM.

    Welcome

    Thanks for stopping by to check out SwitchYard.  This article provides a brief summary of what's inside SwitchYard 0.3.  If you are completely new to SwitchYard and wondering what it is, this blog post provides some good background and pointers to additional information.

     

    Getting Started

    There a number of options for checking out what SwitchYard has to offer.  Listed in order of increasing time investment:

     

    Feature Highlights

    You can find a summary of the new features in the 0.3 release below.  For complete information on all SwitchYard features, check out the docs.

     

    Web Service Orchestration with BPEL

    If you're looking to compose and orchestrate web services, the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is where it's at.  BPEL support is now available in SwitchYard via the new BPEL component, based on Riftsaw.

     

    See this feature in action in the say_hello and loan_approval quickstarts.

     

    SwitchYard on OpenShift

    Bring your service-oriented integration application to the cloud with SwitchYard on OpenShift!  SwitchYard applications can now be deployed to your OpenShift instance on top of JBoss AS 7.  All you need is an OpenShift account and our template application to get started.

     

    Check out the the SwitchYard template application for detailed instructions.


    Big Enhancements to the Rules Component
    • Support for Complex Event Processing.
    • Ability to use a knowledge agent to execute remotely hosted knowledge packages.
    • Simplified contract for stateful services.  Stateful rule services now default to maintaining session state for the life of the service.

     

    See some of these enhancements in the rules-interview-agent quickstart.  Learn more in the docs.


    Proxying In Action

    Enhanced support for proxying and routing between gateways.  This functionality depends on the Camel routing support already present in 0.2 and the new generalized composition framework available in 0.3.  A quickstart has been added demonstrating proxying between two SOAP endpoints.

     

    See this feature in action in the camel-soap-proxy quickstart.

     

    Policy Support

    Support for service-level policy definitions and runtime enforcement of those policies has been added in 0.3.  The initial implementation includes a generic framework for policy definition and handling along with an initial implementation of transaction policy support.

     

    See this feature in action in the policy-transaction quickstart.  Learn more in the docs.

     

    Fine-Grained Control Over Message Composition

    We have added a generalized message composer framework which gives you quite a bit of flexibility in terms of how native message representation are mapped into the SwitchYard Message and Context objects used for service invocation.

     

    More information can be found here.

     

    Installer and Distribution Changes

    Instead of going with an all-in-one download, we have changed to an a la carte format.  The following options are available:

    • switchyard-as7 :  includes SwitchYard and JBoss AS version 7.0.2 Final of the JBoss Application Server.
    • switchyard-installer : includes SwitchYard runtime and an installation script to install SwitchYard into a JBoss AS7 of your choice.
    • switchyard-tools : contains the SwitchYard administration console web application and Forge plugins.

     

    Of course, it's all available for the same low price - free! 

     

    The Getting Started Guide walks you through each option.

     

    Eclipse Tooling

    We now have legit Eclipse Tooling for SwitchYard.  One of the most important pieces here is an m2e extension which ties the SwitchYard project lifecycle to the Eclipse project lifecycle, so now SwitchYard projects can be built and tested within the IDE.  There are also some nice wizards for creating a new SwitchYard project, creating a Bean service, service tests, and more!

     

    See the SwitchYard Tooling docs for more details.

     

    Tooling and Platform Updates

    Keeping up to speed with some other key projects in the JBoss community:

    • AS 7.0.2 - we have updated to the latest final version of JBoss AS7.
    • Forge Beta 3 - we have updated to the latest beta version of Forge.

     

    Improved Test Support

    Test support has been updated to allow for selectively enabling or disabling components being tested with a given SwitchYard configuration.  For example, if you have a unit test which only covers the bean service implementation, you can restrict the test deployer from activating any other services or bindings except the bean service implementation.

     

    More detail available in the Testing documentation.