Building SOA-Based Composite Applications Using NetBeans IDE 6

October 8, 2009

Service Engine Life Cycle

Each Service Engine can exist in one of a set of predefined states. This is called the
Service Engine life cycle.

Started
Stopped
Shutdown
Uninstalled

The figure below gives an overview of the life cycle of Service Engines:

Service Engines can be managed from the command line utility, asadmin, that is
supplied as part of the Sun Java System Application Server. The table below shows
some of the common commands that can be used to manage Service Engines:

Service Engines can also be managed from within the NetBeans IDE instead of using
the asadmin application. We will look at that in the next section.

Service Engines in NetBeans

As we discussed in Chapter 2, the NetBeans Enterprise Pack provides a version of
the Sun Java System Application Server 9.0 which includes several Service Engines
from the Open ESB project.

All of these Service Engines can be administered from within the NetBeans IDE
from the Services explorer panel. Within this panel, expand the Servers | Sun Java
System Application Server 9 | JBI | Service Engines node to get a complete list of
Service Engines deployed to the server.

The NetBeans Enterprise Pack 5.5 and the NetBeans 6.0 IDE have different Service
Engines installed. The following table lists which Service Engines are installed in
which version of the NetBeans Enterprise Pack:

In the previous section, we discussed the life cycle of Service Engines and how this
can be managed using the asadmin application. Using the NetBeans IDE, it is easy to
manage the state of a Service Engine. Right-clicking on any of the Service Engines
within the Services explorer shows a menu allowing the life cycle to be managed as
shown in the figure below:

To illustrate the different states in a Service Engine life cycle, a different icon
is displayed:

Now that we have a good understanding of what Service Engines are, and what
support the NetBeans IDE provides, let’s take a closer look at some of the more
common Service Engines provided with the NetBeans Enterprise Pack.