...then *four* come at once

Jul 17, 2009

Arg - I haven’t had a blog entry in a month! I’m sure at this point that the Marketing Dept have opened the Big Book of Slaps and are thumbing their way towards the end of the list, their quill well-charged and dripping with ink the colour of fresh arterial blood. Or something. But now I have three four things to mention.

FUSE Integration Designer 1.2.1 Released! We’ve pushed out an update to the 1.2 release we did in May. It’s a little point release, primarily about fixing bugs (and the team got through over 100 JIRAs!) but we have managed to sneak in a few improvements, including support in the palette for FTP/SFTP, XSLT and Timer endpoints. Check out the release notes for the full skinny. The download page continues to be in the same place.

One thing to note - if you are updating your existing 1.2 installation from the update site, there’s a small speed bump that turned up at the last second. Make sure that you read the installation notes for some instructions on how to make the update work smoothly for you.

FUSE Forge Open For Business Yes, we’ve made our own Forge - a chunk of infrastructure to support projects that want to extend or apply the various FUSE technologies in whatever way makes sense. Initial reactions appear positive. I’m hoping I can use it for a bit of crowdsourcing action - I’ve set up a  FUSE Integration Designer Samples project, with the plan to add sample projects which illustrate some of the capabilities of the tool. If you have any examples you would like to share, let me know and we can put them up there!

If you have been watching the development of Apache Felix Karaf, and thought to yourself, you know, that’s just another one of them there OSGi containers with some tinsel, ekcetera, you are right. Stephen Evanchik spotted this too, but he went one step further and started creating Eclipse code to treat A.F. Karaf as an Eclipse Target Platform.  Very recently, he migrated this code to the EPL-licensed EIK Project at FUSE Forge, which is fantastic. I’m looking forward to hacking on this stuff with him.

But wait! There’s more! Lukasz, developer of the ServiceMixIde project had been following Stephen’s progress and decided that he would like to bring his code base to the project, too. This is a better start than I could have imagined. Right now we’re getting bootstrapped, code is going in, build systems need to get made (banging Maven and Eclipse rocks together), web sites, CI and all that good stuff.

FUSE Integration Designer Webinar I’ll be doing a webinar, as it is known, on Tuesday 21st July to show how you can use the FUSE Integration Designer to make services, wire together mediation routes and poke around at JMS queues. The times are available on the FUSE Webinars page - yes, it’s happening twice in the one day, and both times it will be live and unexpurgated! Who knows what will happen?

Yikes! I just agreed to be Program Chair for EclipseCon 2010! This should be interesting.

Insert Lightsabre Noise Here

Jun 9, 2009

Just a quick announcement this time around - the guys at the FUSE Forge have just started up Project LightSabre, which is a distributed version of the OSGi EventAdmin (example) service, using Apache ActiveMQ as the event distribution mechanism. It’s been tested on Equinox and Apache Felix, but it should work on other OSGi implementations too. It’s licensed with the Apache 2.0 license

[caption id=“attachment_124” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Zoom! See the events go!”][/caption]

Read the Getting Started guide for more information on how to get going with this.

Update: ECF has followed on with a similar implementation at Distributed Eventadmin Service using the same technologies with a difference license. Fair play!

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.

Working With Enterprise Integration Patterns

Oct 7, 2008

Thanks to Enterprise Integration Patterns, architects have a clear and succinct way to describe integration within complex systems. It certainly beats a lot of MS-Word documents and monster integration architecture diagrams. And, with Apache Camel, we’ve got an open source runtime that allows us to create routes by chaining EIPs together, using Spring XML or Java fluent builders. That’s fantastic, but EIPs are as much about sharing pictures as creating message routing graphs, and where are the pictures?  

We’ve made some tools that will allow you to load up Camel Spring XML files into Eclipse for visual inspection and editing. You can also create EIP diagrams in your Workbench and save them as Camel configurations. Finally, we’ve put in some debugging capabilities to allow you trace through the paths a message will take through your EIP graph.  

We are earnestly seeking feedback - check out the FUSE Integration Designer Preview page to download the Eclipse plugins, or check out the video links under the Training Videos at the bottom of the page.