As we stated in the Preface, JBoss ESB is JBoss' open source Enterprise Service Bus. JBoss ESB enables you to quickly integrate new and legacy systems, exposing their combined functionality through services "plugged" into the service bus. JBoss ESB takes care of routing and processing service requests while you concentrate on your system's design and development.
In this chapter we will:
- Discuss the choices that you have for which distribution of JBoss ESB to run
- Show where you can find the distributions, and how to install them
- We'll also introduce you to the ESB's Administrative Console
- Walk you through how to locate services in the console
- Show you how to debug server errors
In short, you'll learn how to get JBoss ESB up and running. Okay, it's time to get hands-on with JBoss ESB!
One of the ways in which JBoss projects make it easy to get started is that they are easy to install and get running. In most cases, you simply download a ZIP file, and remember, since these are Java projects, you can use the same ZIP project file on any supported operating system and with any supported JVM. Unzip the file to a directory, and run a shell script or .bat file coincidentally named run, and you're off and, well, running. You can install JBoss ESB into any directory that you choose. You can even have multiple installations on the same system.
Note
Please note that in the examples and illustrations in this book, we will download to, and install software into the /opt directory, which is a standard Unix directory for optional software packages. All references to download and installation directories will be relative to /opt. Please note that you may install the JBoss Application Server and JBoss ESB into any directory you want.
Let's begin by looking at how you can download the bits for JBoss ESB.
At the time of this writing, the download page for JBoss ESB was aptly named http://www.jboss.org/jbossesb/downloads. The webpage is as follows:
If you explore around this page, you'll find several older releases of JBoss ESB. The newest releases are always displayed at the top of the page. This is the release (4.10) that we'll install and use throughout the remainder of the book. We'll use the 4.10 release as, at the time of this writing, it was the most up-to-date release, and it includes many features and bug fixes that were not present in earlier releases.
Before we go any further with JBoss ESB, we have to download the application server on which JBoss ESB will run. It's really something of a misnomer to say that you run a JBoss ESB server. What you really do is deploy JBoss ESB to an application server and then deploy your services to JBoss ESB.
So, let's get ourselves an application server.