Netbeans is well known for beeing a great IDE for developing Java SE, Java EE, C++, Java ME, Sun SPOT, Ruby on Rail, PHP, Groovy, ... but NetBeans has more to offer when it come to developing highly modular desktop applications. The desktop application can be from any possible category like Business oriented, scientific, utilities, development tools, entertinement, etc. You can find a list of applications based on NetBeans platform here And it is provided by the NetBeans platform which what NetBeans IDE and all of its complementary packs and plugins are developed based on it.

If you are a Platform developer you may already know that there are many valuable resources like books and articles already available to start with developing applications on top of NetBeans platform. In addition to all of there resources, NetBeans provides you with another option, NetBeans Platform Certified Training, through this program you can freely attend training courses and get certification based on the level of knowledge and experience that you demonestrate at the end or through the program.

In order to secure the application server you need to secure its communication ways with outside world, It means you will need to secure all ports and listeners.

There are 3 kind of listeners in Glassfish application server that you will need to take care of them

First of all make sure that you secured the administration listener, make sure that you have enabled Security for administrator listener and set an specific IP address for it to listen on. Usually we are not going to use administration console from outside of the internal network, so let it listen only on interfaces that you need it to listen perhaps the interface that connect the server to your LAN. In order to do this, open administration console and navigate to:

Configuration> HTTP Service> HTTP Listeners> admin-listener

Change the Network Address as appropriated, check the Security check box, and in the SSL Tab enable Client Authentication, in order to find out how you should use Client Certificate, take a look at my previous posts about SSL and securing GlassFish Application Server. You have two other Http listeners to take care of, so make sure that you change their Network Address and enable the Security facilities if required

There is another listener which you need to take care of, It is your IIOP listener. IIOP listener let you create a context to lookup into your JNDI, etc. In order to configure the IIOP listeners you should navigate to:

Configuration> ORB> IIOP Listeners

Here you can see that there are 3 different listeners already created and configure for different purposes. You should not allow the first non-secure listener (orb-listener-1) to listen over a public network as there is no authentication or transfer layer security for this listener, but the second one (SSL) have transport layer security and the third one (SSL_MUTUALAUTH) has mutual authentication which guarantee that listener will only process request come after a client cert authentication. make sure that you configure the listeners to listen on correct Network address and remove or disable the listeners those that you do not need. You can disable a listener by looking at listener details page which provides a check box for it.

Another listener which you need to take care of is your JMX connector listener, You can view and edit its configuration by navigating to:

Configuration> Admin Service> system

Here you are able to change the realm that this listener use to authenticate the users that are trying to connect to JMX listener, you can change the realm to an specific realm which you have made only for JMX users or let it use you administration realm. You can change the Network Address that this listener is using along with enabling the SSL and Client Cert Authentication in order to secure the data transfer and guarantee that only users with correct digital certification can use your JMX connector to control the application server

PS: All of the listeners that you can configure in your administration console allows you to have Mutual Authentication (Client Cert Authentication) which ensure that both parties have verify-able certifications. This certifications can come from well known providers like VeriSign or your own CA. on the other hand all listeners allows you to specify an specific alias for them, which means that each listener mutual authentication can be configured completely independent from other listeners, for example you can have two alias one for administration console and one for JMX connector in order to prevent JMX users to connect to administration console.

For more information you can take a look at my older posts related to this matter:

• How to secure GlassFish application server, Part I
• Make your Own CA using EJBCA, Part I
• Make you own CA using EJBCA, Part II

The train start running, NetBeans Innovators Grants has just announced.

• Are you an RCP developer looking for some financial support to implenent some modules on top of NetBeans RCP?
• Are you familiar with NetBeans IDE and also you have some ideas in your sleeve, ideas to enhance the IDE functionalitis, ideas about new functionalities, etc?
• Do you know some bugs/ RFEs in issuzilla which you can fix them, but you were looking for financial support?
• Do you have some cool ideas about some sample projects or blueprints showing How one can develop Java/ J2EE/ J2ME/ Ruby/ C++ projects using NetBeans IDE and its capabilities?

If you fit into one of the above categories, you can join the NetBeans Innovators Grants, a sub program of SUN Microsystems US$ 1 million Program which is intended to help people develop open source projects sponsored by SUN Microsystems.

Take a look at NetBeans Innovators Grants Home Page, read it carefully, check SubMission Details page to gain some understanding of what is expected in your submission, and after you prepared your project proposal you can come to Proposal Submission page and file in the forms with your project details in order to jump into the contest train.

Another item which could be the subject of a project is contributing articles, tutorials and sample codes to NetBeans Zone located at Netbeans Zone, this web site. it is intended to be the most complete source of articles, links,.... for NetBeans platform and IDE.

P.S: Make sure that you read the legal page located at: Legal information

I was looking at feeds that my email client fetched during the day and I find am interesting one which lead me to an article written by Jonathan Campbell. Article can be found at http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-2007/jw-12-appservers.html

Jonathan compared 3 different application server/ servlet container by thier support of Java EE 5 and some other factors. article explained about each feature that he compared application servers based on it. Jonathan did not included GlassFish in his review of "open source Java application servers" and only included 3 application servers/ Servlet containers including Tomcat, Jboss and Geronimo. :-), So I thought I should include some facts here in order to make the comparison fair to all parties.

Including Glassfish into Jonathan matrix will give us the following table: *Notice*

Following descriptions further explain some of what Glassfish can provides in relation of the above table

• GlassFish fully support Java EE 5 with all its related JSRs like JSP 2.1 (JSR 245), Servlet 2.5(154), EJB 3.0(JSR 245), etc.
• GlassFish support clustering and cluster management out of the box, a cluster can be configured from both CLI and Administration console.
• GlassFish administration console allows you to configure your load balancer :-), for example you can configure a Sun Java Web Server which works as load balancer to add or add/ remove an instance from its list of servers, either manually or automatically if a new node joined the cluster or removed from the cluster
• GlassFish allows you to manage resources for entire cluster at once instead of applying them for each instance, for example you can deploy a web application into a cluster of 10 instances instead of deploying it seperately for each instance.
• GlassFish has a very wide array documentation both from Sun Microsystems (for free) and from GlassFish community.
• GlassFish installation is as easy as executing 2 commands.
• Deploying applications into GlassFish or even an entire cluster of glassfish instances is just 2 clicks away.
• Quality of GlassFish components is out of any question, Metro is well known for supporting new WS-* standards, EJB support uses Toplink Essentials, MQ server is Sun open sourced MQ, etc.
• GlassFish has very good interoperability with some other open source projects like, OpenESB and OpenSSO which allows you to have what you need to kick start your J2EE application without looking at any additional configuration.
• Certainly performance is something which everyone should have in mind before considering other feaures, take a look at http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/res2007q3/jAppServer2004-20070703-00073.html and http://weblogs.java.net/blog/sdo/archive/2007/07/sjsas_91_glassf.html to find out more about how much capable GlassFish is.
• GlassFish has connectors for both Eclipse and Netbeans, although other mentioned servers have a connector in Netbeans and Eclipse.
• Seam support is available from GlassFish 1 upward.
• Business rule engine support is available from OpenESB project integration.
• About hibernate support, I cannot understand whether Jonathan means to use Hibernate as a persistence provider or plainly as an ORM, by the way both of this ?features? are available for GlassFish users.
• GlassFish has an Update center, which allows you to update your application server from a remote repository.
• GlassFish runs on all mentioned platforms, from Windows to AIX (Glasdfish 2 update 1 runs on AIX) and there is no restriction for you to run it on your platform of choice.

Mentioned items are in relation to what orginal article tried to compare. GlassFish can be used by a ROR developer by its integration with first class ROR IDE (Netbeans 6), It can serve you VOIP and SIP requirement by means of sailfin,etc. Any user with any kind of requirement will find GlassFish a suitable application server.

Although Jonathan did not mentioned GlassFish directly, but he gives his opinion by writing:In my experience commercial application servers have more bugs than the open source servers compared in this article, and they are more difficult to install. Deployment can also be an issue -- at least with the recent version of Sun's Java Application Server. The article could be more complete if Jonathan included GlassFish in his comparsion chart and at then end he could write that GlassFish has problematic deployment procedure

An statement which looks odd to me is: In my experience commercial application servers have more bugs than the open source servers compared in this article, and they are more difficult to install., Althogh it will be a complex procedure to setup a Cluser of Websphere (as a commercial application servers ) using websphere XD, Object Grid, and other available packages that faciliate enterprise scale deployment of Websphere, but WebSphere has a decent performance and reliability which is very hard to deny.

Notice: Some parts of this table taken from Jonathan Campbell article published by javaworld and is available at http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-2007/jw-12-appservers.html

It is some days that I saw some posts about securing Glassfish in production environment, so I thought I write some of my experience here to let other secure the glassfish easier. There are some basic items that you will need to relay on in order to have a secure Glassfish installation.

1. secure access to administration console, both web based and CLI.
2. secure all ports and listeners that application server uses to interact with outside applications.
3. secure your environment from GlassFish; Yes, glassfish can be evil if you have buggy software installed on you application server.
4. secure your application server from the environment that it is operating on it.
5. secure glassfish directories in order to prevent any accidental changes, use, etc in glassfish configuration files.
6. Take care of all logging if you are not going to secure Glassfish on the file system.
7. tips and tricks which are not mentioned in the above sections.
8. firewalls, network security, clustered environment tips and tricks

But how you can do these, I will explain each item in as much details as I can begin with securing your administration console. As you know administration console is the main interaction point with an application server, however must of application servers let you perform all changes from a CLI or direct editing of server.xml, domain.xml and so on. But Web based administration console is the most open to access part of application server, So let’s see how we can secure it:

You will need to change administration password from the default one, do it by using the following command in CLI when your application server is running.

change-admin-password

Using this command you can change your administration password both for CLI and Web based console. The output of the command may differ from version or profile to another version and profile but it will asks you to enter old and new password, in case that it asks to accept a certificate accept it, you will change it later.

Second thing that you should change is master-password, make sure that you stop your application server before issuing the command as it will not work when the as is running. Following command in asadmin console will do it for you. Default master password value is “changeit”

change-master-password

Now you are sure that your administration console and keystore files are protected using a new password which you know.

Its time to take a closer look at application server web based console protection, you need to make sure that you have most possible protection over your administration console by limiting access to it using firewalls and after that you can add another level of protection and transmission integrity by using a mutual authentication using Digital Certificate.

By changing the administration http listener to use an a digital certificate specific for administration console and changing its setting to use client-cert authentication or mutual authentication you can ensure that your administration console will only opens in a browser which has a digital certificate signed by a CA known to your administration listener.

This way you can be sure that only the guys with that specific digital certificate will have access to your admin console and the administrator will not fool by anyone to connect to a mock server. On the other hand you have full protection of SSL over your transmitted data. To learn how you can setup your own CA and add keys to glassfish keystore take a look at some older entry of my weblog. however those entry shows how you can use digital certificate when your AS uses jks files ant certDB files.

In the second part of the series, you can see how we can utilize EJBCA to create certification for a client side application which will communicate with Glassfish server when Client cert authentication (Mutual Authentication) is enabled whether by changing the listener attributes or by describing it in the web-config.xml.

In order to create client certification we will need to perform following steps as described in 4 sections:

Section 1: Creating clients certification profile:

• Go to https://localhost:8080/ejbca/ and select Administration.
• Select Edit Certification profiles from the left side menu.
• Enter a name for the profile and press add button. I choose Clients as the name.
• From the list select Clients Item and press Edit button.
• Now profile edit page will open change the attribute as follow:
  • for Key Usage  you should select at least Digital Signature and Key Encypherment.
  • From  Extended Key Usage select Client Authentication
• press save button.

Section 2: Create servers end entities profile:

Now you have create a profile which in next sections you can create certifications which will comply with it. Now we will need to create an End Entity Profile so follow these steps to create it.

• From the left side menu click on  edit end entities profile .
• Enter ClientsProfile as profile name and press add button.
• From the list select ClientsProfile and press Edit End Entity Profile button.
• Enter a user name and a password for the profile, I choose cAdmin/ cAdminAdmin.
• Enter the common name
• From the list of Available Certificate Profiles  select Clients which we made in last step.
• select JKS as default token.
• click Save

Now we are reaching an step in which we will create the real certificate that client will use to prove its identity and initiate SSL enabled session. To create the certificate perform following steps:

Section 3: Create Client certification

• From the left side menu select add end entity link.
• Select ClientsProfile as End Entity Profile.
• Enter all information as you like.
• Select JKS as Token.
• press add end entity button

Section 4: Use the certification in Client Application.

You are done, the certification is ready to be downloaded and used.

• Go to https://localhost:8080/ejbca/  and select Certification Enrollment.
• Select Manually for a Server
• Enter user name and password which you have entered for end entity in previous step.
• Click OK.

By pressing OK a JKS file will download to your computer.

Create two copies of the file and Rename them  to keystore.JKS and cacerts.jks. In order to create a SSL enabled client, either web service client or any type of socket client which need to use SSL you can follow one of the following path:

• When you want to run your java application pass following parameter to JVM, it will ask JVM to use your cacerts.jks and keystore.jks during initialing SSL communication and authentication.

-Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore="Truststore_Location"    -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword="Truststore_Password"   -Djavax.net.ssl.keyStore ="Keystore_Location" -Djavax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword="Keystore_Password"

• Second way is adding the same parameter to your JVM during execution of your application code. using this way you are not forced to pass parameter and disclose your key stores passwords.

System.getProperties.put("javax.net.ssl.trustStore","Truststore_Location");
System.getProperties.put("javax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword","Truststore_Password");
System.getProperties.put("javax.net.ssl.keyStore","Keystore_Location"); 
System.getProperties.put("javax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword","Keystore_Password");

Make sure that you are using correct location and password for your files, passwords are same as one you used to download the JKS files.

I should say again that you can explore and perhaps learn more about jks files, keys and certification by exploreing your stores, you can use jks file editor located at http://members.aon.at/bhuber14/nbm.html. Also if you are may find more cool key store editor in NetBeans Module Portal

For more information or maybe to find some of your questions answered you may take a look at:

• http://www.ryandelaplante.com/rdelaplante/entry/ssl_and_http_basic_authentication
• blogs.sun.com/swchan/entry/how_to_use_verisign_cert

One of the most repeated question in GlassFish mailing list is SSL, Certification, Mutual Authentication,.... In this Entry I will try to address some of this questions by giving an step by step guide for using EJBCA to issue certificate, use them in both glassfish and clients which connect to glassfish in some manner. clients like web browser, standalone java applications,...

There are several tutorial and blog entry about configuring glassfish to use some specific certification in order to perform server authentication for clients over SSL and each of those weblog is an invaluable source of information. In this blog entry and perhaps the next one I will address another concerns which some people has for their GlassFish and client security. Some times we are running an application within an enterprise and we need to have mutual authentication for every clients that connect to server so we will need to have one certification for client and another one for our glassfish server. both of this certification should be valid (issued by an already known CA within glassfish trust store and client trust store). For these two entries I assume that our client and server will just accept certification issued by our own CA which is based on EJBCA.

Before we start the main job you will need to download and install EJBCA from its web site, then you will need to install it according to its manual which you can find in documentation section. After you installed and could view EJBCA administration console then you can follow the rest of the entry.

In order to create server certification we will need to perform following steps as described in 4 sections:

Section 1: Creating servers certification profile:

• Go to https://localhost:8080/ejbca/ and select Administration.
• Select Edit Certification profiles from the left side menu.
• Enter a name for the profile and press add button. I choose servers as the name.
• From the list select servers Item and press Edit button.
• Now profile edit page will open change the attribute as follow:
  • for Key Usage  you should select at least Digital Signature and Key Encypherment.
  • From  Extended Key Usage select Server Authentication
• press save button.

Section 2: Create servers end entities profile:

Now you have create a profile which in next sections you can create certifications which will comply with it. Now we will need to create an End Entity Profile so follow these steps to create it.

• From the left side menu click on  edit end entities profile .
• Enter ServersProfile as profile name and press add button.
• From the list select ServersProfile and press Edit End Entity Profile button.
• Enter a user name and a password for the profile, I choose sAdmin/ sAdminAdmin.
• Enter the common name
• From the list of Available Certificate Profiles  select Servers which we made in last step.
• select JKS as default token.
• click Save

Now we are reaching an step in which we will create the real certificate that Glassfish will use  in its SSL enabled listener. To create the certificate perform following steps:

Section 3: Create server certification

• From the left side menu select add end entity link.
• Select ServersProfile as End Entity Profile.
• Enter all information as you like but make sure that CN should be Exact and fully qualified name of your sever as will access it from clients, for example if you are going to access the serve as computer1.mydomain.com then the CN should be the same if you are going to access it as Comuter1 then the CN should be that.
• Select JKS as Token.
• press add end entity button

Section 4: Use the certification in Application Server.

You are done, the certification is ready to be downloaded and used.

• Go to https://localhost:8080/ejbca/  and select Certification Enrollment.
• Select Manually for a Server
• enter user name and password which you have entered for end entity in previous step.
• Click OK.

By pressing OK a JKS file will download to your computer.

• Create two copies of the file and Rename them  to keystore.JKS and cacerts.jks.
• Goto Glassfish/domains/domain1 (If domain 1 is the domain that you want to configure for SSL).
• Make sure that application server is stopped by issuing the following command.

	Glassfish_home/bin/asadmin  stop-domain domain1	

• Now we need to change the master password in order to let glassfish open our new cacert.jks and keystore.jks so perform following command.

	Glassfish_home/bin/asadmin  change-master-password  \\\Here you should write the password that you choosed in last step/// --savemasterpassword=true

• Now Goto glassfish_home/domains/domain1/config and create a backup from cacert.jks and keystore.jks.
• Copy files that we create in first step of this section to this folder (overwrite the original files).
• Open domain.xml (it is in domain1/config folder) by a text editor and replace all s1as occurrences with CN name that you have choose in section 3.
• Start the application server.

You are done, you application server should start normally, but you have some more steps before you complete the mutual authentication capability.

Section 5: Enabling mutual authentication for a listener.

Open application server administration console and from the left side menu select Configuration> HTTP Service> HTTP Listeners> http-listener-2, now you should check the Security check box and select SSL tab, now make sure that you have checked Client Authentication check box.

You are done, point your browser to https://computer1.mydomain.com:8181 you will see that this page will only open for the browser that you have imported EJBCA administration certification. it means that both server and client must prove their identity before they could communicate.

In next entry of this series I will demonstrate steps that you need to follow in order to create a stand alone web service client.

Make sure that you need to delete the private key of you server from cacerts.jks (it is not necessary by the way). Best way to explore you key stores is using keytool which you can find more information about it Here. Also if you are may find more cool key store editor in NetBeans Module Portal

For more information or maybe to find some of your questions answered you may take a look at:

• http://www.ryandelaplante.com/rdelaplante/entry/ssl_and_http_basic_authentication
• blogs.sun.com/swchan/entry/how_to_use_verisign_cert

Today accidentally I find a coll shortcut in NetBeans, it do something fun, if you press ALT+SHIFT+ENTER IDE switch to full screen, it will remove Title bar, status bar, and toolbar to give you a little more space when you are writing your code.

Here is an image of netbeans in this mode, you will find it usefull.

Also If you are looking for some NetBeans sample you can take a look at NetBeans IDE Sample Applications which is a good start point for you to find some ready to run samples for different platform from java SE to RoR which is fully supported in NetBeans 6.

It is sometimes that I use Ubuntu in home as primary OS, a shortcut that I am used to use is ALT+Space to minimize, maximize or restore a window. But in Ubuntu or maybe in Gnome, It is my first time that i use Gnome as primary desktop, this key combination act differently.

When I pressed ALT+Space as i used to do it and it showd a semi transparent window which let me select one of application links that are present in Gnome/Ubuntu menu a link to some web site, a folder in my home directory or something else which i have not descovered yet.

The opened window allows you shows all menu items that begins with your typed character and let you select your target shortcut

Here is an screenshot of this window. a wonderful thingy, by the way maybe it is not Gnome built in feature and one of additional packages that i installed add it to Gnome.

GlassFish version 2 monitoring capabilities

GlassFish version 2 provides good mentoring information about different aspects of application server and all of your applications that are deployed into GlassFish but before it can show those statistical information you need to configure its monitoring service. Figure 1.

Although this statistical and monitoring information and the way that they are presented is not as luxurious as weblog and websphere one's but they are good enought to help you track what is going in your server.

To enable monitoring service of GlassFish you need Commence with openning administration console, Locate the configuration node and expand it now select monitoring now choose all components that you want to monitor, select high for more details and sure more overhead and low for less details and less overhead. Figure 1.

Now you should be able to see some monitoring detailsby going to monitoring pages, monitorig pages are placed under different nodes in administration console based on your installation profile. If you are not sure about your glassfish profile, follow the developer profile item.

• For the cluster or enterprise profile In the tree component, select Common Tasks, then click View Monitoring Data.
• For the developer profile, in the tree component, select the Application Server node. Click the Monitor tab.

Glassfish categorize monitoring information under three categories, these categories are as follow:

Call Flow:shows you how many requests are replyed successfully or with a failure and how much time consumed for that request in different layer of application server. Figure 2

Runtime:this category provides information about JVM, Garbage Collection, HTTP service, Listeners (http/s), ect. for example under JMV node of these category you can use memory item to view fine grained details about your application server heap. Figure 3

Applications:Let you select an application and view details about that application components, for example you can view how much time a servlet has called and how time its call taked. Figure 4

Resources:here you can view detailed information about all of your resources like connection pools, connectors, jms connection factories, etc. For example you can view fair amount of details about your connection pool in order to hunt possible connection leake or to tune your connection pool. Figure 5

Transactions:These allows you to view what is state of transactions that are running inside your application server.

It is my first blow entry written from my Ubuntu 7.04 installation and I am happy with my switch from OpenSuse to Feisty Fawn :-)

OpenSSO  which is open source branch of Sun Java Access Manager has several module which you should install and configure in case that you want to have similar bundle from its open source branch.

One of main components is OpenSSO itself which you can obtain from  Its nightly builds page; just make sure to select latest link which will take you to the download page with links to OpenSSO modules.
OpenSSO file name should be OpenSSO.war; this file is server side application that handle all authentication and authorization related activities. in the download page you can see several other modules, for this blog entry I will give you some details about installing OpenSSO and Administration Command Line Tools. ((It should be last row link in component download page).

To install OpenSSO, you can follow a detailed installation instruction in OpenSSO easy installation just make sure that you remember value that you determined for  Configuration directory because we will use it to install CLI (Command Line administration Interface).

Now that you have installed OpenSSO you can install its CLI package. Download amAdminTools.zip and extract it somewhere in your hard dist. after you have extracted it follow this sequence to complete its installation open a terminal (cmd)  and navigate to directory that you extract the amAdminTools.zip; execute: setup -p  <OPENSSO_CONFIGURATION_DIRECTORY>

It should echo some text indicating that installation is successful. If you want to know more, Installation is nothing more than creation of batch files that I will talk about one of  them in next step. this batch files use some files that are located in opensso configuration directory to perform their operations.

the file that I will talk about is named amadm.bat or amadm.sh this file let you manage your OpenSSO installation from a command line interface even if opensso server is running. all sub commands of this command has a set of 2 common parameter

1. -u amAdmin : this is default administration username. you can create more users with administration privileges.
2. -w <password> it is your password which you determined during opensso installation.

Now lets try some commands

amadm.bat create-realm -e /realm12 -u amAdmin -w adminadmin

amadm.bat list-realms -e / -u amAdmin -w adminadmin

amadm.bat list-identities -e / -x "*" -t User -u amAdmin -w adminadmin

amadm.bat

By default root realm is named openSSO and your created realm will be a child of that realm, Now you can open openSSO web based administraton console and check the result of CLI with it

It is some times that http://www.javarss.com/ is not as it was before, indeed it looks to be hacked or something like that. What I really want to know is, what will happen next? why its host provider did not take any action  to remove this ugly page from the web site front page?

I hope website owner could find a way to make it functional again.

You will see what ESB is and how it can ease development and deployment. I will also show what BPEL is and how it can affect your development, while demonstrating NetBeans’ level of support for ESB and BPEL. Building a scenario-based sample which uses some of NetBeans Enterprise Pack features in the BPEL and ESB area is the final things I will demonstrate.

What can an ESB do for us?

An ESB which can act as a JBI compliant is an infrastructure that manages, monitors or enhances service's capabilities in several ways like providing more connectivity mechanisms which has been added to ESB by binding components. Binding components can interact with resources outside the ESB. For example a JDBC binding component can act like a consumer and poll a database table for new records and whenever new records become available transforms them to a standard message named Normalized Message and sends it to the other participants by using a message router named Normalized Message Router or NMR. Messages that are produced by binding components may require transformation in order to meet business rules or making usable messages for other binding components or service engines. A service engine provides and consumes services within ESB. BPEL service engine which hosts long running business process based on BPEL standard is as a sample of service engine.

JBI compliant ESBs are based on XML-web services standards and usually support several WS-I standards like WS-Addressing, WS-Security and etc. When you install NetBeans enterprise pack you are adding a wide range of capabilities to your IDE for developing composite applications which are equal to JBI service assemblies. At the same time, installing Enterprise pack will install a version of glassfish integrated with Open-ESB 2.0 that addresses all your needs.

What is BPEL role in your SOA?

I am not going to talk about technical details of BPEL; I would prefer to say what it can do. BPEL allows us to orchestrate some fine grained web services to perform a more coarse grained long lived asynchronous or short lived synchronous business operations. For example you can develop a web service that persists data based on some meta-data which are attached to your data, a web service that check validation against pre-defined rules, a service that sends email to some recipients. Now you can use BPEL and some other features that are provided by BPEL engine to perform a business operation like order saving and customer registration; so BPEL provides us with features that can highly reduce amount of fine grained web services that we develop in our entire enterprise.

What does NetBeans as a development tools?

NetBeans enterprise pack provides us with a first class designer for BPEL, WSDL and XSD. Another very good feature that is introduced in Enterprise pack 5.5.1 is CASA editor. Composite Application Service Assembly editor let developers to see a high-level view of how the Service Assembly is connected and configured. More importantly, users can modify connections between elements within the Service Assembly. The routing of Service Units and Binding Components can be easily tweaked, or completely redone as it provide visual editor enriched with a component palette for all available artifacts like binding components and service units.
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