Does Spring dm server help to gain OSGi independence?

Recently when I talked to people or read articles about Spring DM Server it was frequently explained that one reason for using it in favour of plain OSGi is to gain independence from OSGi.
Although Spring DM Server comes with a simple to use POJO-based approach to implement OSGi services, the same can be achieved with OSGi declarative services which is part of the OSGi standard services.
With just one configuration file one can turn a POJO into an OSGi service without any OSGi plumbing. This seems to be often overlooked.

There are other reasons why one would want to use Spring DM server instead of plain OSGi, but achieving independence is clearly not.
Rather the opposite is true. Instead if relying on the widely accepted OSGi industry standard another dependency namely Spring DM server is added.
That is ok if it helps to create a better technical solution, but there is a price to pay.

Biztalk Technology Specialist

I passed the Microsoft Biztalk Server certification (MCTS) with flying colors (985).

An MCTS is:

“A Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 (MCTS: BizTalk Server) has a deep and broad understanding of the design and development of distributed applications that use BizTalk Server 2006. The credential holder has also demonstrated expertise in deploying and managing a BizTalk Server 2006 solution and can create a BizTalk orchestration, integrate business rules and human workflow services, manage business processes, troubleshoot BizTalk solutions, and consume and publish Web services.”

I knew that before, but now it is official. 😉

Now I an entitled to deliver the official Biztalk MOC courses (2033 and 2934) in addition to the regular development courses.

How to enable request logging for pax-web-service OSGi bundle

Due to lack of documentation enabling request logging for the pax-web-service OSGi bundle can be time consuming task.
This is how it can be achieved:

1. Create a OSGi fragment bundle using Maven 2 like this: pom.xml
2. Add jetty.xml to src/main/resources directory of your project. Example: jetty.xml
3. Install the bundle into your OSGI environment.

This approach works with pax-web-service-0.6.0.jar and Eclipse Equinox 3.4.0.

Rules, Processes or Services?

Together Services, Business Processes (BPM) and Business Rules (BRM) can be a powerful combination to keep the SOA promise of creating agile business applications.
I often hear questions about how those three can be combined in a reasonable way.
In their article Implementation of business rules and business processes in SOA Boris Lublinsky and Didier Le Tien give some practical advice.

New SOA Workshops

Recently we released the SOA Open Source Reference Platform (OSRP) Workshop.

If you have ever tried to evaluate Open Source technologies you might have experienced that a lot of time is lost in simply integrating all the different tools and products.
The idea behind the workshop is to provide people with an integrated environment which can be used to quickly learn Open source SOA technologies. This environment is called the SOA Open Source Reference Platform (OSRP).
After the workshop the attendees have a sound understanding if and how Open Source products can be used to build a reliable SOA platform.

The OSRP-Workshop is ideal after attending the SOA Workshop which gives an overview about terms and technologies used in the area of Service-oriented Architecture.

Is EJB dead in times of SOA?

In times of lightweight containers and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) is not the predominant development model anymore. Instead multiple technologies and frameworks are competing to be THE service development model of the future. For instance SCA, Spring, Axis, CXF and …

… probably EJB?

The Jbi4Ejb Binding Component allows to integrate Stateless Session EJBs into an ESB infrastructure, thus making them available to service consumers.

This is again a nice example of how open standards such as JBI help to protect the investments of the past.