Java Reference
In-Depth Information
It does not implement JBI, BPEL4People, or WS-HumanTask. If you want to create business
processes that allow both automation of service calls as well as human tasks, take a look at its
BPM suite.
Software AG/webMethods ESB
In 2007 the German company Software AG bought webMethods. It offers a BPMS (Business
Process Management Suite) that represents its SOA stack, and at the center of it is its ESB,
the webMethods Enterprise Service Bus.
Differentiating features
The webMethods ESB does not require an application server, but it does extend the Java EE
capabilities of the platform by running on top of the JBoss container. Its differentiating fea-
tures are as follows:
Bidirectional Java invocation
Bidirectional Java invocation
The webMethods platform includes functionality that allows you to directly invoke EJB
methods running in another application server, but it also allows application servers to in-
voke logic running within the webMethods integration platform. The platform supports
the same bidirectional functionality for JMS.
JCA-based adapters
The Java Connector Architecture (JCA) has been popular for several years as a standard
mechanism for using Java to connect to legacy systems and packaged apps. JCA is to such
apps what JDBC is to relational databases. The webMethods implementation uses JCA,
and you can take advantage of this fact if you have existing JCA-based adapters.
Reliability
Reliability
The ESB and integration server supports clustering and failover. The bus maintains ses-
sion information so that a request can be failed over to another node and continue process-
ing transparently.
Robust rules support
Robust rules support
The business rules implementations in some ESBs are fairly limited. The webMethods
strategy is to incorporate the Fair Isaac (creators of FICA scores everywhere) Blaze Advi-
sor Rules Engine (see
Figure 14-4
).
