A new web console for JBoss ESB

JBoss ESB is definitely a very nicely implemented service bus with a strong focus on SOA principles. It is an open source, backed by a living community, deployed in many enterprises. However, it has one obvious deficiency: a rather limited user interface. There is a bunch of tiny consoles - for management, configuration, transformation, but none of them really fulfills what I consider a must - comprehensive, intelligible, web-based tool for managing of all ESB artefacts. I'd like to browse and search through services, visualize a message flow within a service, create new actions and listeners by drag-n-drop etc.
You may say: if you don't like the present state, help and improve by yourself. And we did! We are close to a beta release of our web console, planned for the beginning of December. You can see some screenshots and more at esb-console.com. Stay tuned!

Frank Cohen on FastSOA

There are plenty of interviews about SOA, but this caugth my eye recently. Frank Cohen adresses scalability and performance issues in a concept he calls FastSOA. I like his approach, which is practical and can be used on the enterprise level. I will not recount the whole interview here, just a short quote:

FastSOA addresses these problems:

• Solves SOAP binding performance problems by reducing the need for Java objects and increasing the use of native XML environments to provide SOAP bindings.
• Introduces a mid-tier service cache to provide SOA service acceleration, transformation, and federation.
• Uses native XML persistence to solve XML, object, and relational incompatibility.