User Guide

Introduction

BEA AquaLogic Service Bus is part of BEA's new AquaLogic family of Service Infrastructure Products. AquaLogic Service Bus manages the routing and transformation of messages in an enterprise system. Combined with its monitoring and administration capability, AquaLogic Service Bus provides a unified software product for implementing and deploying your Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

AquaLogic Service Bus is a configuration-based, policy-driven Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). From the AquaLogic Service Bus Console, you can monitor your services, servers, and operational tasks. The console provides you with the ability to configure proxy and business services, set up security, manage resources, and capture data for tracking or regulatory auditing. The AquaLogic Service Bus Console enables you to respond rapidly and effectively to changes in your service-oriented environment.

AquaLogic Service Bus relies on WebLogic Server run-time facilities. It leverages WebLogic Server capabilities to deliver functionality that is highly available, scalable, and reliable.

This guide provides detailed information on using and configuring AquaLogic Service Bus. It is intended for those responsible for messaging and SOA, such as enterprise architects, operations specialists, security architects and developers, application architects and developers, server and application administrators, and support engineers.

While sometimes providing procedural information, this guide does not provide detailed information on how use the AquaLogic Service Bus Console. You can get this information from the AquaLogic Service Bus Console Online Help.

The following outlines the information contained in this guide:

• Modeling Message Flow in AquaLogic Service Bus—presents guidelines to follow when you model message flows in AquaLogic Service Bus. A message flow defines the implementation of a proxy service, which is the AquaLogic Service Bus definition of an intermediary Web services that is hosted locally on AquaLogic Service Bus. In AquaLogic Service Bus, service clients exchange messages with an intermediary proxy service instead of directly with a business service.
• Securing Inbound and Outbound Messages—contains the information that you need to secure messages when using AquaLogic Service Bus, including transport configuration, Web Service Policy, access-control security, and securing AquaLogic Service Bus for a Production Environment.
• Change Management and Resource Organization—describes AquaLogic Service Bus's capabilities to manage changes and organize the resources in the repository. The resources in the AquaLogic Service Bus repository include WSDLs, Schemas, XQueries, XSLTs, MFLs, WS-Policies, Business Services, and Proxy Services.
• Monitoring—contains information about monitoring and collecting run-time information for systems operations and business auditing purposes. Describes how you can monitor the health of the system, including the state of the services, servers, and Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations.
• Reporting—provides information on how to capture message data for tracking messages or regulatory auditing. This section also contains information about setting up your own reporting provider; using the JMS reporting provider included with AquaLogic Service Bus; using the Reporting module in AquaLogic Service Bus Console; and configuring a reporting provider for alert data. Alerts contain information about SLA violations.
• Tracing—contains information on how to trace messages without having to shut down the server. This feature is useful in both a development and production environment. This feature allows you to troubleshoot and diagnose a message flow in one or more proxy services.
• Tuning AquaLogic Service Bus—this appendix provides tips on tuning AquaLogic Service Bus in a production environment.
• Debugging AquaLogic Service Bus—this appendix provides information about enabling debugging for different modules in AquaLogic Service Bus.