NMR filter/interceptor
I was reading the manning book "Understanding Enterprise SOA" over the weekend and there was a section on the benefits of SOAP interceptors for silently listening in on SOAP requests/response for statistical purposes.
Using my limited knowledge of JBI I tried to think of a way to mimic this concept/pattern in terms of JBI. The only way I could think of was to create an interceptor component that simply consumed messages from the NMR and then sent them back out unmodified on it. a SA with a SU for the interceptor component could be created that would route messages between a consumer and a provider through it.
Is there a simpler way to implement the interceptor/filter concept in JBI? I didn't see any API to "listen in" on the NMR.
The JBI expert group spend quite a bit of time discussing the adding filters/interceptors/processing chains or similar mechanisms. We decided to hold off until a later version of JBI, for a variety of reasons that I won't go into here.
There are really only three alternatives available to you:
- implementation-specific extensions
- use of a "logging" SE
- add interceptor support to the components you are writing (a partial solution, and not applicable to everyone)
The Open ESB implementation doesn't provide any sort of interceptor mechanism, but it does provide delivery channel instrumentation (MBeans) that does provide some of the statistical data you mentioned.
Use of WS management frameworks like Amberpoint provide a lot of management features, including policy enforcement, beyond simple instrumentation. Of course, such frameworks are based on SOAP message traffic interceptors, not abstract messages like JBI's. Such things are certainly possibilities for JBI 2.0.
Speaking of JBI 2.0, we are going to be having a discussion about it during the JavaOne conference in San Francisco next month. The particulars are:
Session Id: BOF-0089
Session Title: What's Next for Java?Business Integration (JBI)?
Track: Core Enterprise
Room: Franciscan I
Date: 17-MAY-06
Start Time: 21:30
Everyone who is interested in JBI's next steps should attend!
