Quickstart 2.2 (Fri, 18 Jul)
Two Minutes Tour
An Enterprise Service Bus
Petals helps you to integrate your Enterprise Business Units in order to provide a value added global solution. By assembling all your enterprise elements, you can provide new applications by re-using some existing ones.
Thus, all your applications expose their logic by exposing services. This concept is known as a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Petals offers a solid backbone for your enterprise Information System and acts as a Bus where all your data are exchanged. Petals connects services to each others. Petals is an Enteprise Service Bus (ESB).
From a chaotic architecture :
To a Service Oriented Architecture :
Java Business Integration
To promote such an architecture, Petals implements the Java(tm) Business Integration specification (JSR 208). J.B.I. describes a "Service Component" approach.
Components are elements that offer services. Those Components are plugged on a JBI container. The services that they expose are accessible throught Endpoints.
Each consumer-component can request the JBI container to find a service. The JBI container give to the consumer the corresponding Endpoint. Then, the consumer send a message to the service-provider thanks to this Endpoint.
The JBI specification is strongly based on WSDL. Thus, each Component has to provide a WSDL description of the services it exposes. Moreover, the content of message exchanges, between a consumer and a provider, is XML.
A Component can acts as a Binding Component; it allows the JBI environment to interact with external services using a particular protocol (SOAP, JMS,...).
A Component can also acts as a Service Engine; it promotes directly some services, such as XSL Transformation, BPEL orchestration,...
Some artefacts can be deployed on these Components, to offers new services (XSL style sheets for a XSL Transformation Engine, a BPEL definition for a BPEL orchestration engine, ...)
Petals as a distributed JBI environment
Petals is a multi JBI-container environment.
Each JBI container is deployed as closed as possible to the business services of a department unit. Then, the communication between the JBI containers is transparently for the components.
Communication between containers is based on the robust message exchange middleware JORAM (an opensource JMS implementation).
