This book describes the core capabilities of JBoss ESB, and how you can apply them in building your own services and applications. For all its functions, JBoss ESB does not exist in a vacuum, however. One of JBoss ESB's great strengths is its wealth of integrations with supporting tools and other JBoss technologies. We've briefly referred to some of these integrations (for example, as in Chapter 4 where we describe JBoss ESB's library of OOTB actions, including actions that support the integration of JBoss ESB with other JBoss projects). This appendix expands on the discussion of JBoss ESB's integrations with other JBoss technologies and tools and how you can use them with JBoss ESB.
The "heart" of the configuration of a JBoss ESB based application is the set of services and providers that you define in the application's jboss-esb.xml file. If your application makes use of multiple services (and their actions and listeners) and providers, then this file can grow quite large and can be troublesome to maintain by editing its raw XML. JBDS, however, includes a GUI based ESB editor that makes it much easier to create and maintain an application's configuration in the jboss-esb.xml file.
To invoke the editor, simply double-click on an application's jboss-esb.xml file in JBDS. The editor looks like this (note that we'll use the "helloworld" quickstart's jboss-esb.xml file as an example):
The major configuration elements of a JBoss ESB application are its providers and its services. To define a new service, the editor presents you with a drop-down list of all the supported provider types:
A service performs its tasks through the actions that you define. For out-of-the-box actions implemented by JBoss ESB, the editor presents you with a drop-down list of the full set of supported actions:
You can edit the properties for these OOTB actions in the editor. For example:
Custom actions that you create still require you to write the custom code for the actions. The ESB editor enables you to view and modify the action properties. For example:
