JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform Release Notes

For the latest version of these release notes for JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform please refer to the online documentation available at http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/jboss/.

There are two versions of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform:

The standalone version is intended for use in environments where a lightweight solution is required; for example when a Java Application Server is already installed on the network. It does not include the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform with JBoss Application Server, Seam, Hibernate, or clustering. It provides core ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) functionality only.

The embedded EAP version includes, in addition to the Enterprise Service Bus functionality, the JBoss AS server and other components and frameworks to provide a fully-fledged application development environment. This version provides services such as clustering, transactions, and persistence through the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

In addition to these release notes, there is a docs subdirectory that includes documentation for the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. In the embedded EAP version of the platform the documentation is split into two subdirectories. One contains documentation relating to the ESB core of the SOA Platform, and the other contains documentation relating to the EAP component. The standalone version has the ESB document only in the docs directory.

The first document that you will probably be interested in is the document SOA_Getting_Started_Guide.pdf. This document contains instructions to install and configure the platform. You should check for the latest version of this guide at http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/jboss/.

There is another document GettingStarted.pdf that comes from the ESB project. The Trailblazer demo app mentioned at the end of that document is not shipped with the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. However, there are a number of quickstart samples in the jboss-as/samples/quickstarts directory, with accompanying readme files.

There is also a very useful and interesting book SOA_ESB_JBPM_Integration_Guide.pdf in the docs directory. This book demonstrates the integration of JBoss Business Process Managmenet (JBPM) with the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in the SOA Platform.

There are several different server profiles for the embedded EAP version of the platform, and only one for the standalone version. The default server profile is the server profile that will be used when the server is started without any command line parameters. This profile has ESB server functionality enabled.

In the case of the standalone version the default profile is named default.

In the case of the embedded EAP version there is a profile named default, but this is not the default profile used. The default profile used when the embedded EAP server is started with no parameters is the profile named production. Please refer to Section 2.6, “Securing jBPM for production environments” for more information about this profile.

The included Hypersonic SQL database provides default "out of the box" database functionality for evaluation and development use only. It is NOT recommended or supported as a production-use database. Technical support is not available for this component, and while we are happy to accept bugs filed against this component, we do not make any commitment to fix them within a specific timeframe.

Two distinct jbpm-console.war files are shipped with the platform. One is a development version which allows unauthenticated access to deploy processes to the server, for use with a graphical process design tool such as JBoss Developer Studio while developing applications. The other is a production version which secures the console against remote deployment. You should not run your server in a production environment with the unsecured development version of jbpm-console.war deployed. Doing so poses a threat to the security of your server.

Standalone version of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform

In the standalone version, we ship with the unsecured uploader console by default. Initially, your server is configured for development. The jBPM JPDL will be able to deploy processes. Before putting it into production you should secure the console.

In each case the file must be overwritten. You can not have two versions of the war in the deployment directory.

Embedded JBoss Enterprise Application Platform version of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform

In the embedded JBoss Enterprise Application Platform version, the "all" profile has the development version of the war, and the "production" profile has the production version. By default your server is configured to operate in a secure mode. To enable it for development mode you need to run in the unsecured mode of operation.

We do not recommend running the server on an unsecured network with the jbpm-console-development.war deployed or using the all profile without appropriate modification.

The behaviour of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform differs from that of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform in some JAXR Scout tests in our testsuite. This indicates differences between the jUDDI / Scout implementations that may have an effect on applications. At this stage there are no known instances of these differences affecting applications. However, if you find an instance of this difference affecting an application, please inform us.

Further Information: http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/SOA-354.

As a workaround for an issue in JBoss Messaging, which will be resolved in a future update, specific settings are required when configuring a datasource for use with JBoss Messaging.

If you reconfigure the datasource used by JBoss Messenging, you should ensure that this datasource is used exclusively by JBoss Messaging, and that the ds file contains the following elements:

<prepared-statement-cache-size>50</prepared-statement-cache-size>
<share-prepared-statements>true</share-prepared-statements>

Further Information: This is a workaround for the issue described in http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/SOA-288

When JBPM is deployed on Linux using MySQL version 5.0.45 as the database concurrent signalling from multiple threads has been detected. As such, this combination is currently not recommended for production use. This issue is not present with MySQL version 5.0.27.

Further Information: http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/SOA-196.

In this release the following gateways do not use the ServiceInvoker, and therefore do not provide load balancing:

Load balancing is performed when a raw message is transformed into an ESBMessage, or when an ESBMessage is sent to an ESB listener. Be aware that a raw (non-ESB) message sent through one of the above three gateways will not be load balanced.

When one of these gateways is deployed on multiple ESBs that listen to the same clustered queue they will share the load through JBM clustering, but there is no failover to another type of EPR.

These gateways will have load balancing enabled in a future release.

Running the webservice_wsaddressing quickstart currently results in an error. In the standalone version of the platform a message is produced on the console: "Cannot provide WebServiceContext, since the current MessageContext does not provide a ServletRequest". This is caused by a 181 dependency on an HttpServlet. Presently, JBoss WS does not inject the WebServiceContext into the webservice.

This is due to a current limitation in JBoss WS, and will be addressed in a future update.

Further Information: http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/SOA-348

When the server is under load JBPM operations have been observed to fail with a constraint violation exception when using Oracle or PostgreSQL. This has not been observed with MySQL. We've made calls to JBPM from the SOA server asynchronous and JBPM should retry these failures. It is a consequence of JBPM's optimistic locking policy.

Further Information: http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBESB-1511.

This version of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform does not bundle development tools such as the Graphical Process Designer (GPD) for JBPM-PDL or a Rules Editor plug-in for Eclipse. These development tools and others are available in JBoss Developer Studio.