First taste of ServiceMix

It's been just over a month since my last post and that's fair too long. So, you might ask, what's going on? Well I had a slight diversion from Java CAPS to take a closer look at ServiceMix. I only spent a little over week looking into ServiceMix so that doesn't justify any kind of experience let alone blog about it. However, for those who are curious but may not have the time to look at ServiceMix, I've decided to share my first impressions.

I started out by installing LogicBlaze FUSE on a CentOS linux VM along with the FUSE Development Environment, which is Eclipse with some plugins. Now why FUSE you might ask? Well FUSE is interesting because it is marketed as a "runtime environment for SOA" that is based on best-of-bread open source projects. Since I was asked to look at the viability of using ServiceMix at an enterprise level, I felt that a platformed based on ServiceMix may have more to offer verses just an ESB. Anyway, back to the fun :) Ok, so now I have FUSE installed and the Development Environment on a linux distro. I start up the IDE and click on the area for a tutorial on the first screen and eclipse crashes! Ok, not a very good start. It seems like most of the SOA products are "happier" on Windows so I switched platforms to a Windows XP VM. Things seemed a little more stable from then on. In the interest of time, my colleague Tom Purcell then took the "ball" with the FUSE stuff and I turned my focus on ServiceMix.

I installed ServiceMix 3.1 stand-alone on my Windows XP VM and started looking at the canned examples (i.e. File Binding and loan-broker). A couple things really impressed me:

• Ease of Service Assembly deployment - Very similar to deploying a web app (.war file) in Tomcat, just copy your service assembly archive (e.g. loan-broker-sa.zip) into the deploy directory of the ServiceMix installation home. ServiceMix will then try to load the assembly and tell you if you need anything.
  
• Ease of JBI component installation - wow, it can't get much simpler than this. The loan-broker example require some JBI components that were not installed in my instance of ServiceMix. So, how did I know...well ServiceMix was kind enough to tell me exactly what JBI components I needed in the server log. Here's an example from the log:
  
  

  10:14:12,571 | WARN  | Timer-4    | AutoDeploymentService    | ramework.AutoDeploymentService  341 |
  Components servicemix-lwcontainer are not installed yet: the service 
  assembly loanbroker deployment
  is suspended and will be resumed 
  once the listed components are installed
  
  
  10:14:12,883 | INFO  | Timer-4    | AutoDeploymentService    | ramework.AutoDeploymentService  646 |
  Directory: deploy: Finished installation 
  of archive:  loanbroker-sa.zip
  

  
  What is also very nice is that ServiceMix suspended my assembly until the dependencies were resolved! In this case I need to find the "loanbroker-sa.zip", as the log told me" and copy it into install directory.
  

The File Binding example is a very good example of declarative programming in ServiceMix. It's not a robust example but it does give you a sense of the benefits for developing JBI compliant assemblies.

Ok, with the good there's always some bad. The bad in this case is lack of documentation and current documentation. For example, I was trying to do a little work with XSQL in ServiceMix and I found a page on the ServiceMix website about it. The problem is that the code snippets and configuration were missing. After plenty of searches, a couple emails to a user group and even pulling down the latest source from subversion I found that the XSQL support was moved to a "sandbox" area. I was encouraged to use a non-JBI compliant JDBC component instead. It's still not clear what the future is for XSQL in ServiceMix. That is just one of many examples where the documentation is lacking. Obviously, this plays a role in an evaluation of any product or project.

Overall I'm very encouraged with what I've seen in a short period of time with ServiceMix. I'm back working with Java CAPS to finish up what I started with our use case in the lab. However, I'm really curious to continue looking at ServiceMix and how it compares to another JBI compliant ESB OpenESB.