Burr Sutter wrote:
Option 2 is basically replacing jboss-esb.xml with a .jpdl, right?
A mixture of MC and .jdpl yes. You'd need MC beans to define connectors
that are shared between services. (or any bean that is shared between
services).
And we've have a ton of work to do to make .jpdl expressive
enough to
support what jboss-esb.xml does today.
Actually the opposite. You have tons of work to do to make
jboss-esb.xml as expressive as .jdpl. IMO, ESB's kernel is pretty
basic. Its all the converters, connectors, and transformers where all
the hard work went into from what I've seen.
When the ESB was presented to
Tom B he suggested we build our own process language on top of jBPM. He
thought that would take approximately 2 people 2 months assuming all of
the features mapped into the underlying engine.
Bill, is this what you are suggesting?
No, that's not what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting jBPM team does most
of the work with the underlying kernel and ESB team focuses on
enterprise features around and within it like connectors, transformers,
EJB, JPA, Hibernate integration, ESP, Rules integration, and ESB federation.
I think with 2 man weeks of work you could beanatize ESB components as
well as the jBPM object model. Then 1st iteration could be wiring
everything together (inbound, outbound, nodes, actions, transitions)
using MC XML. From there you could see the usability patterns and write
a schema to simplify things for developers. Or, still beanitize ESB
components, but prototype by hacking jbpm 3.2 while jBPM team works on
jbpm 4.0 based on requirements from ESB, Rules, and Seam teams.
Again, my main drive here is to have a well integrated, uniform look and
feel to web-flow, esb, and bpm. I really think these technologies work
just as well together as they do apart. If all these guys are sharing
the same underlying architecture, then it makes it easier to for Seam to
tie them together in a unifying API and to share components between them.
I'm sorry I'm being so aggressive about this. I just feel that its so
crucial to have a unified, seamless platform.
Bill
--
Bill Burke
JBoss, a division of Red Hat Inc.