Announcing: FUSE Integration Designer 1.2

May 19, 2009

Phew. It’s out the door. FUSE Integration Designer 1.2 is now available for download.

This release follows on from a couple of preview releases that we ran to gauge our approaches and get feedback. And we got plenty of it, in all flavours.

You might already know what FUSE is about - it’s four popular Apache projects (ActiveMQ, Camel, CXF, ServiceMix), bundled together into a single offering with subscription-based support from Progress Software. These four projects bring together capabilities around messaging, Web services, message mediation and the ESB concept, the idea being to give you a grab-bag of goodies that make sense when you are trying to solve integration problems.

As you might imagine, it’s an interesting task to put together a toolset that lets you blend these technologies in way that can suit every integration issue. In our preview versions, we concentrated on visualization and debugging of Camel routes and creation of Web services. I think the first thing we learned was that users tended to hit the limits of the tool far too quickly - the routes, for example, had a limited set of capabilities that was outstripped by what Camel had to offer. So we concentrated on making sure that the tool could handle any (1.5 or 1.6) route configuration you could throw at it. Let me know if you break it :)

We also filled in some glaring holes in the preview - you can now deploy your Web services to ServiceMix 3.x and ServiceMix 4.x containers, for example, and we have put in some tools that will let you rummage around inside your ActiveMQ message broker, introspect the queues and topics, inject messages for testing and snoop on messages that are going by. You can save and reload your state too, so it’s possible to set up and share a set of messages and configurations for testing or joint review.

There’s more, of course.

The previews were delivered solely as an Eclipse update site, which could be a bit of a bear to interact with. This time around, you download zip files that have everything - Eclipse core, dependencies, FUSE code, the works. They are big ok, but it means that you get everything in one swoop. There’s online help in there, and some cheatsheets to get you started.

Try it out - download is here, forum is here - and let us know what you think.

What next? The radar is moving on to things like JAX-RS tooling, Camel 2.0 support (runtimes go faster than tools, that’s why they are called runtimes, natch), getting a deep integration with m2eclipse and such like other tasty treats. If you’ve got a hankering for anything particular, let it be known in our tools forum.

By-the-by, since we are all Twittertastic these days, you can get more FUSE news by subscribing to @fusenews or indeed subject yourself to my edgy waffling at @oisin.

Developing Silverlight clients for CXF using JAX-WS Tools

Feb 9, 2009

I just found out that the eclipse4SL, a development environment for creating RIAs with Microsoft Silverlight, is using JAX-WS Tools for Apache CXF. In the linked how-to, the guys show how to develop a Silverlight client that accesses a Java Web service. Nice!

Celtix Enterprise

Dec 4, 2006

IONA, the company I work for, has just released an Open Source bundle called Celtix Enterprise. It's a collection of Open Source elements geared towards helping you create your distributed SOA infrastructure -- we've integrated and tested these. So where's the return? IONA is doing the for-pay training, consultancy and support for this product. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Release the Hounds!

Dec 4, 2006

Or, in this case, the incubating projects. Apache Yoko incubator has published an M1 release. Yoko (no, I don't know why it's called that) is a fast Java CORBA server which can be used in Open Source JVM and JEE implementations. Hot on it's heels, it looks like the Apache CXF (yes, I know why it is called that - don't ask) is gearing up to an imminent 2.0-M1 release. CXF should be very interesting to people who are doing JAX-WS service development - I have been using it myself in another project and it has worked very well.

Back in the SOA Tools Platform project we're adding UI support for JAX-WS service development and we are testing against CXF to make sure that we are generating the correct classes and dealing with the JAX-WS and other annotations in the right way.