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.

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.

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

To enable a jms-jca-provider to talk to queues on other nodes you will need to use a provider adapter.

You will need to define an MBean representing the provider adapter, for example:

<mbean code="org.jboss.jms.jndi.JMSProviderLoader"
        name="jboss.esb:service=JMSProviderLoader,name=RemoteJMSProvider,server=remote">
    <attribute name="ProviderName">remoteProvider</attribute>
    <attribute name="ProviderAdapterClass">
        org.jboss.jms.jndi.JNDIProviderAdapter
    </attribute>
    <!-- The queue connection factory -->
    <attribute name="QueueFactoryRef">XAConnectionFactory</attribute>
    <!-- The topic factory -->
    <attribute name="TopicFactoryRef">XAConnectionFactory</attribute>
    <!-- Connect to JNDI on the host "remote" port 1099 -->
    <attribute name="Properties">
      java.naming.factory.initial=org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContextFactory
      java.naming.factory.url.pkgs=org.jnp.interfaces
      java.naming.provider.url=remote:1099
    </attribute>
</mbean>

This MBean should be defined in ha-jndi.xml on the node where the queue is really deployed

Then, in the definition of the jms-jca-provider you need to add a providerAdapterJNDI attribute, e.g:

providerAdapterJNDI="java:/remoteProvider"

The JCA adapter will use the provider adapter from JNDI to create the JNDI context.

Further Information: http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBESB-1460

As mentioned throughout the Programmers Guide, high-availability services within JBossESB are currently only supported if they are stateless. The Aggregator action is a stateful instance, which necessarily means that if it is used within the Action Pipeline/Chain of a service, that service is no longer stateless and therefore cannot be used in a high-availability manner.

Further information: http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/SOA-421

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.

Various errors and warnings are logged when running the jbpm_orchestration2 quickstart on a machine with multiple CPUs using HSQLDB or H2 as the database. The HSQLDB database is provided with the platform as an out-of-the-box db provider for testing purposes, but it is not a supported production database. These errors are not logged when using a Tier 1 supported database.

Further Information: http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/SOA-409 | http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/SOA-417 | http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/SOA-415 | http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/SOA-410

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.

Adding a trailing space to a decision node expression will cause an exception to be thrown. To avoid this exception decision node expressions should not have a trailing space.

Further Information: http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/SOA-450

Some issues have been observed with message throughput in JBPM. In this release JBPM logging is disabled by default to address this.

Further Information: http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/SOA-429.