How to Deliver Composite Applications with Java, WS-BPEL & SOA

By Kevin Schmidt, Gopalan Suresh Raj, Prabhu Balashanmugam	Article Rating:
April 9, 2007 09:30 AM EDT	Reads:	28,129

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Testing
The need to write a client application just to test a newly deployed composite application can be daunting. NetBeans eliminates this need by providing a powerful test facility. This facility is automatically added under the Composite Application projects. The users can create any number of test cases to test various functions of the deployed composite application and specify the success criteria for these tests. The input and output messages for the test cases are also automatically generated when the user selects the WSDL that corresponds to the business process to be tested. The user can then customize the messages as needed in the editor shown in Figure 7. The test facility also maintains a log of all the test results. In case of system errors, the server and application logs can be viewed from NetBeans. This facility allows users to immediately test just-deployed composite applications.

The user adds a test case for the application discussed in the article. The output message can be customized before the first run or the output message from the first run of the test case can be used as the expected output message.

Okay, What's Next?
Java EE 5 SDK provides the complete set of tools and environments required for composing services using WS-BPEL. Invoking all services as SOAP/HTTP Web services could bring out the obvious concern about performance. WS-BPEL can be used to directly invoke Enterprise JavaBeans to compose functionality from Java EE applications. Java EE 5 SDK can be used to model business processes that can invoke internal and external Web services and Enterprise JavaBeans directly, as shown in Figure 8.

Business processes can invoke the services available in those technologies including REST Style Web services. If you are interested in finding out what other options are available for composing services and processing business events, check the following open source projects.

NetBeans: http://netbeans.org/
GlassFish: http://glassfish.dev.java.net/
Open ESB: http://open-esb.dev.java.net/

CIO, CTO & Developer Resources

You can get the latest version of the products and updates on the enhancements that are currently being worked on. You can also join and contribute to these projects if you're interested.

The source code for the sample projects used in this article can be downloaded from the online version of this article at http://jdj.sys-con.com.

Summary
This article has discussed and shown the many capabilities in the Java EE 5 SDK Tools Bundle for delivering composite applications using Java, WS-BPEL, and SOA technologies.

First, this article discussed the benefits of these two technologies and how they can work together to enable the development of next-generation applications.

Second, this article demonstrated how NetBeans provides a truly integrated development environment that allows users to extend existing Java services, create new Java services, and compose Java services with a business process. This article has also shown how NetBeans can be used to iteratively develop, build, deploy, and test composite applications seamlessly, thereby reducing the overall turnaround time and effort required to deliver composite applications.

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