An Impatient Start with JBoss Riftsaw - 5 steps in 5 minutes

I often recall having to spend many hours fighting with complex and error prone processes to install server software and get an 'helloworld' example running. With JBoss, however, it's much simpler. Unzipping a couple of files and maybe running ant generally does the trick.

Which brings us to Riftsaw, JBoss's new open source BPEL 2.0 engine. Riftsaw integrates with JBoss ESB and is optimized for use with the JBoss AS server. Even though it's a new project, it's easy to get going in only a few minutes. The entire set up process is documented in the Getting Started Guide, but if you're impatient, here are the steps. You can install and deploy everything you need in about 5 minutes, Assuming you don't have too slow a network connection. ;-)

You need (3) packages:

• A JBoss application server to host Riftsaw,
  
• A JBoss ESB server to support accessing services over the ESB,
  
• and Riftsaw itself
  

Here are the (5) steps to take: (note - for this example, we're installing into /opt/local)

Step 1 - Install JBoss AS 5

On thing to keep in mind here is that you'll have to use Java 1.6 and install the for JDK 1.6 version of JBoss AS

Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jboss/files/JBoss/JBoss-5.1.0.GA/jboss-5.1.0.GA-jdk6.zip/
unzip jboss-5.1.0.GA-jdk6.zip

Step 2 - Install/deploy JBoss ESB 4.6 to AS

Download: http://www.jboss.org/downloading/?projectId=jbossesb&url=/jbossesb/downloads/4.6/binary/jbossesb-4.6.zip
unzip jbossesb-4.6.zip
cd /opt/local/jbossesb-4.6/install
cp deployment.properties-example deployment.properties
edit deployment.properties-example (set "org.jboss.esb.server.home=/opt/local/jboss-5.1.0.GA")
ant deploy

Step 3 - Build/Install/Deploy Riftsaw to AS

cd /opt/local
mkdir riftsaw ; cd riftsaw
svn checkout http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/riftsaw/trunk/
mvn clean install -P docs
cp distribution/target/riftsaw-2.0-SNAPSHOT.zip /opt/local
cd /opt/local
unzip riftsaw-2.0-SNAPSHOT.zip
cd /opt/local/riftsaw-2.0-SNAPSHOT/install
edit deployment.properties (set "org.jboss.esb.server.home=/opt/local/jboss-5.1.0.GA" and "org.jboss.esb.home=/opt/local/jbossesb-4.6")
ant deploy

Note: An alternative to building Riftsaw from the trunk source would be to download the latest stable build from: http://www.jboss.org/riftsaw/downloads.html

Step 4 - Start up the AS server

cd /opt/local/jboss-5.1.0.GA/bin
sh ./run.sh

Step 5 - Run a quickstart

This BPEL quickstart sends a message, modifies it, and sends back the modified version.

cd /opt/local/riftsaw-2.0-SNAPSHOT/samples/quickstart/hello_world
ant deploy
ant sendhello
View the process here: http://127.0.0.1:8080/bpel-console/org.jboss.bpm.console.Application/Application.html

OK. It's not really 5 steps, to run the quickstarts that use the ESB, there's one more step:

Step 6 - Run an ESB quickstart

First, deploy Riftsaw ESB samples to the ESB directory.

cd /opt/local/riftsaw-2.0-SNAPSHOT/install
ant deploy-esb-examples

Then, run a quickstart:

cd /opt/local/jbossesb-4.6/samples/quickstarts/conf
cp quickstarts.properties-example quickstarts.properties
edit quickstarts.properties (set org.jboss.esb.server.home=/opt/local/jboss-5.1.0.GA)
cd /opt/local/jbossesb-4.6/samples/quickstarts/bpel_helloworld
ant deploy
ant sendesb (to demonstrate an ESB action invoking a BPEL process)

Well - my 5 minutes are up. What's next? I want to try all the examples, read the documentation and spend a lot more than 5 minutes working with Riftsaw. I also want to examine Riftsaw-ESB integration in greater detail in a subsequent blog post. It's described in the User Guide... ;-)

BPEL Editor for RiftSaw

As many of you saw in Burr's webinar presentations today, we are planning on leveraging the Eclipse BPEL editor for use with the RiftSaw runtime. Consistent with JBoss practice, this editor will be distributed at part of JBoss Tools. I'd encourage those interested to visit the JBT site and make use of their downloads, forums, mailing lists, JIRA, etc. to participate in the open source community around this part of our BPEL offerings. Doing so will make sure that all involved see any questions or comments.

Webinar: Simple, Open and Affordable BPEL

As more and more organizations are leveraging BPEL to specify orchestration of Web services, there is a growing need for a simple, open and affordable implementation.

In this session, you learn how Red Hat plans to deliver an enterprise-class, supported, open source BPEL engine as part of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio. You also learn how to leverage this technology to help your organization fulfill the promise SOA and have an opportunity to interact with the key engineers behind the product.

Date: July 22, 2009
Time: Choose from two live sessions:
- 9am EDT (New York) / 13:00 GMT / 3pm CEST (Paris)
- 2pm EDT (New York) / 18:00 GMT / 8pm CEST (Paris)

Speaker: Burr Sutter

Register Now

http://www.jboss.com/promo/BRMWebinarSeries/

Here is link to the slides.

JBoss BPEL Server

Project Riftsaw is a WS-BPEL 2.0 engine that is optimized for the JBoss Application Server container. WS-BPEL 2.0 is an XML-based language for defining business processes that orchestrate web services.



Riftsaw supports :

• short-lived and long-running process executions
• process persistence & recovery
• process versioning
• JBoss deployment architecture, enabling hot deployment
• ant-based deployment
• integrated with the JBoss ESB
• Eclipse-based designer (Bundled with JBoss Tools 3.1)

Riftsaw is based on Apache Ode and will extend Ode in the following ways:

• Tight integration with Eclipse BPEL editor
• Support for JBossWS, and therefore the three web service stacks (Native, Apache CXF and Metro)
• Enterprise quality management console
• Runs in JBoss Cluster

We welcome your input and involvement. Please get started as an end-user by downloading these items, read the getting started guide and provide feedback in the forums. If you are interested in becoming a contributor to this new and exciting project please use the developer forums to contact us.