Ok, so I like the idea of ServiceMix, but attempting to dive in head-first seems to be a bad idea - there are just simply too many options! And the documentation seems to be a bit lacking in the areas I'm having trouble with.
My ultimate goal is the following: One 'Service' which receives a SOAP message over HTTP and sends it on over JMS (possibly transformed via XSL first). One 'Service' which receives a SOAP message over HTTP, converts it (possibly via XSL) to a flat, fixed-length record, and then sends it over JMS. The response will also be a flat, fixed-length record, which will need conversion. But let's ignore that one for now - I'll be very happy if I can get the first one up and running. However, since I don't actually have access to the *real* end-points at the moment, what I need to do in the interim, to show that this will work for us, is to create a simple 'hello world'-type response for the above service. That is, I would create a JMS end-point in SM which responds with a fixed (or semi-fixed) SOAP message, ideally without writing any Java (XML is fine). So, where am I stuck with this? At the beginning. I see there are a number of different ways to deploy *stuff* to SM, but I can't find a good description of what the differences are between them. Should I be looking at creating a Blueprint? A Spring Module? An OSGi Module? A Spring/OSGi module? A Service Unit with Service Assemblies? Are some of these not applicable to what I'm trying to do? Are some of these, in fact, actually the same thing, or a sub-set of another thing? Now, having been looking at the documentation, I think that, once I've figured out what sort of deployment object I need to create, I would be using the servicemix-cxf-bc component, with a 'Consumer' endpoint, and probably a 'Provider' endpoint too. The Consumer would be what I would target from my application or from SoapUI, correct? And the provider would be what I would use as a mock end-point? This would a WSDL-first (well, preferably WSDL-only) SOAP deployment, as we will be calling out to a web service that someone else is providing over JMS. The WSDL does include a JMS binding, though I would still likely need to configure the target address and queue and so on. And to configure JMS I will need a separate configuration file, provided via the 'busCfg' option? I'm pretty sure that this JMS configuration will not need to specify a reply queue - just a destination queue, as ServiceMix/CXF will handle getting the reply automatically, correct? I believe that it will generate a queue to use for this request, and will include the name of that queue in the headers of the JMS message it sends. Assuming that's all correct, how do I actually generate a mock response with the provider? I assume I need to use some form of Camel Routing for that? I apologise for all the questions, but I just can't quite get my head around how SM is supposed to work, or where I need to look for answers. Should I actually be reading the FuseESB documentation, as that's based on SM? Many, many thanks, - Andrew Thorburn
