Book review: IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB) V7 Development Guide
Z Jacek Laskowski - Wiki Projektanta Java EE
IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB) V7 Development Guide by IBM UK Laboratories in Hursley, UK
Explore WESB V7 features with the extremely concise and well-written Development Guide
Exploring IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB) V7 with the Development Guide will more likely yield terrific learning benefits for anybody wishing to learn about Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as an integration architectural design pattern and WESB as its realization with a few useful, short yet real-life use cases for the available mediation primitives and the mediation flow SCA component.
NOTE: I've experienced a glitch on the publication site and thus I was not able to download the document using Firefox. Safari and Internet Explorer worked fine.
I've been working with IBM WebSphere ESB for more than a couple of years as a IT Specialist for WebSphere at IBM and am still by no means an WESB expert. I found the document enough enlightening to propose it as a gentle introduction to the concept of ESB and the product - WESB. It's not very common to find a document that's so concise and with no traces of clutter. This one deserves attention.
With the other PDF publications available in WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus 7.0.0.3 for distributed platforms Documents in PDF format it's obvious that the nearly 50-page long document is outstanding twofold - for being short yet very informative.
The chapters are extremely concise - reading them is a pleasant experience. They're usually very short, perhaps too short at times. While not accustomed with many screenshots or diagrams, the existing ones serve their purpose quite well. Having read the document, I wish it were even longer so I could find out lot more. There's certainly a lack of extensive explanation for the decisions for or against a given primitive.
As noted in the Chapter 1. Introduction:
"This development guide is for enterprise architects, integration architects and developers who are responsible for implementing integration and connectivity solutions."
I wouldn't have said it better. That's what nicely summarizes the content of the book. Rest assured, it's really true. I'd say the more such documents, the time better spent while reading them.
The document has its weaker places. Mentioning WebSphere Process Server in a 2-line paragraph at page 2 or a brief, 1-page overview of WebSphere Transformation Extender and the mediations available in WESB to work with it at page 42 came to me as a complete surprise, but these are the only places I could spot.
The chapter 2. presents Common Usage Patters "to speed up the process of implementing connectivity and integration solutions". Each usage pattern is accompanied by a half-page introduction and a figure. 7, briefly presented usage patterns for ESB (with no reference to WESB altogether) can help you master the area, regardless of the product you're to use to implement them.
If you're looking for an intro to Service Component Architecture (SCA) the chapter 3. won't disappoint you. The 6-page chapter turns the learning into an easy task. It's easy reading again, which should be applauded by SCA newcomers as well as more advanced SCA advocates.
The next chapter 4. provides a more in-depth overview of mediation flows in WESB V7. You can learn about mediation flows, primitives, SMO and its structure to handle different integration scenarios. I found it a bit too cursory and plain with just a single diagram presenting the SMO structure. While not breathtaking, it's still worthy and a must-read for WESB developers.
It goes beyond the WESB introduction with the chapters 5 and 6 when concrete scenarios are developed for a fictitious company. Gradually extending the functionality of a mediation flow component as a means of demonstrating the primitives was the key for the success of the document. You'll find a case for these well-known primitives like the message filter, the type filter, the flow order or the custom mediation primitives, but there are less-known ones too - the message element setter and the data handler mediation primitives.
I'd ask for a small yet hopefully useful change to include a list of all the available WESB V7's mediation primitives with their explanations. I believe I've seen such a table in a WESB/WPS development course or in the IBM Education Assistant. It'd facilitate a better understanding of WESB V7's value.
