Common architectural elements for modern integration architectures (Part 2)

By Eric D. Schabell November 30, 2018January 21, 2019

In Part 1 of this series, we explored a use case around integration being the key to transforming your customer experience.

I laid out how I’ve approached the use case and how I’ve used successful customer portfolio solutions as the basis for researching a generic architectural blueprint. The only thing left to cover was the order in which you’ll be led through the blueprint details.

This article, which is Part 2 of the series, starts the real journey at the very top, with a generic architecture from which we’ll discuss the common architectural elements one by one.

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How integration is key to customer experience (Part 1)

By Eric D. Schabell November 28, 2018January 21, 2019

For the past few months, I’ve been digging into my new role with a group of Portfolio Architects, looking specifically at integration as the key to omnichannel customer experience.

It’s an interesting challenge in that we’ve been given the mission of creating architectural content based on common customer adoption patterns. That’s very different from most of the traditional marketing activities usually associated with generating content for the sole purpose of positioning products for solutions. When you’re basing the content on actual execution in solution delivery, you’re cutting out the chuff.

What’s that mean?

It means that it’s going to provide you with a way to implement a solution using open source technologies by focusing on the integrations, structures, and interactions that actually have been proven to work.

What’s not included is any vendor promises that you’ll find in normal marketing content: those promises that, when it gets down to implementation crunch time, might not fully deliver.

Enter the term architectural blueprint.

In this series of articles, let’s look at these blueprints, how they are created, and what value they provide for your solution designs.

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Auto-generating news and publishing it to WordPress with Apache Camel

By Ricardo Zanini August 27, 2018August 25, 2018

With the release of Apache Camel 2.21, some new components were added to the project and Camel WordPress was one of them. Camel is one of the upstream community projects for Red Hat Fuse. In this article, we will see how to use this new component to publish an auto-generated news post based on a soccer statistics API. The example consumes the statistics API, generates the text based on a Natural Language Generation (NLG) library and then publishes it to the WordPress blog.

WordPress is one of the most used open source tools for creating websites. More than 30% of the web is built on top of WordPress. Besides creating websites, blogs, and apps, WordPress leverages a huge plugin repository maintained by a passionate community. There are even plugins that can turn a WordPress website into an e-commerce platform.

Since version 4.7, WordPress exposes a REST API capable of interacting with its resources, for example, users, categories, pages, posts, and custom types. Now it’s possible for third parties to integrate with the WordPress platform and perform almost anything with their resources.

Some companies implement internal websites, blogs, and project sites using WordPress. Integrating such platforms with another company’s components—such as CRM, ERP, LDAP, and Calendar Services—would add extra value to WordPress-based projects. Camel WordPress can help integrate those components easily. To get started using this new component, nothing is better than a demo.

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Reducing data inconsistencies with Red Hat Process Automation Manager

By Donato Marrazzo August 22, 2018August 22, 2018

Managing data reconciliation through a specific process is a common necessity for projects that require Digital Process Automation (formerly known as Business Process Management), and Red Hat Process Automation Manager helps to address such a requirement. This article provides good practices and a technique for satisfying data reconciliation in a structured and clean way.

Red Hat Process Automation Manager was formerly known as Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite, so it’s worth mentioning that jBPM is the upstream project that fuels Process Automation Manager. The blog post From BPM and business automation to digital automation platforms explains the reasons behind the new name and shares exciting news for this major release.

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Setting up RBAC on Red Hat AMQ Broker

By Yohanes Widi Sono August 6, 2018August 3, 2018

One thing that is common in the enterprise world, especially in highly regulated industries, is to have separation of duties. Role-based access controls (RBAC) have built-in support for separation of duties. Roles determine what operations a user can and cannot perform. This post provides an example of how to configure proper RBAC on top of Red Hat AMQ, a flexible, high-performance messaging platform based on the open source Apache ActiveMQ Artemis project.

In most of the cases, separation of duties on Red Hat AMQ can be divided into three primary roles:

Administrator role, which will have all permissions
Application role, which will have permission to publish, consume, or produce messages to a specific address, subscribe to topics or queues, or create and delete addresses.
Operation role, which will have read-only permission via the web console or supported protocols

To implement those roles, Red Hat AMQ has several security features that need be configured, as described in the following sections.

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How to migrate your SOAP web service to REST with Camel

By Brian Fitzpatrick July 24, 2018July 24, 2018

SOAP-based services are plentiful in many enterprise solutions and are slowly being replaced by RESTful services to simplify their use. There is a new wizard to help you make the transition with Apache Camel’s Rest DSL added in the latest version of Red Hat Fuse Tooling. This article shows how to use the new wizard to transition from older SOAP-based services to more modern REST-based services.

If you aren’t familiar, Red Hat Fuse is an integration platform based on Camel and a number of other projects. The updating Fuse Tooling is available in Red Hat Developer Studio 12.0.0, the desktop IDE that is based on Eclipse 4.8 Photon. You can also get the new wizard by adding JBoss Tools 4.6 to your existing Eclipse 4.8 Photon installation by downloading it directly, or installing via the Eclipse Marketplace.

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Monitoring Red Hat AMQ 7 with the jmxtrans Agent

By Roman Martin Gil June 6, 2018June 5, 2018

Monitoring Red Hat AMQ 7

Red Hat AMQ 7 includes some tools for monitoring the Red Hat AMQ broker. These tools allow you to get metrics about the performance and behavior of the broker and its resources. Metrics are very important for measuring performance and for identifying issues that are causing poor performance.

The following components are included for monitoring the Red Hat AMQ 7 broker:

Management web console that is based on Hawtio: This console includes some perspectives and dashboards for monitoring the most important components of the broker.
A Jolokia REST-like API: This provides full access to JMX beans through HTTP requests.
Red Hat JBoss Operation Network: This is an enterprise, Java-based administration and management platform for developing, testing, deploying, and monitoring Red Hat JBoss Middleware applications.

These tools are incredible and fully integrated with the original product. However, there are cases where Red Hat AMQ 7 is deployed in environments where other tools are used to monitor the broker, for example, jmxtrans.

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Red Hat Fuse 7 Is Now Available

By Christina Lin June 4, 2018November 15, 2018

Red Hat Fuse 7 (formerly called Red Hat JBoss Fuse) is now officially available. This cloud-native, distributed solution allows developers to easily develop, deploy and scale integration applications. Architects can compose and orchestrate microservices with Red Hat Fuse to introduce agility to the systems. In this release, Fuse also empowers integration experts and business users to become more productive with the self-service low-code platform. With this new agile integration solution, enterprises can now engage in wider collaboration with and among partners at a much quicker pace.

Here’s where you can download it: https://developers.redhat.com/products/fuse/download/.

What’s in Fuse 7?

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Adding API Gateway Policies Now Easier With Red Hat 3scale API Management

By Hugo Guerrero May 30, 2018June 4, 2018

With the June 2018 release of Red Hat 3scale API Management 2.2, adding API Gateway policies to your API management layer is easier than ever.

What is a Policy?

Red Hat 3scale API Management provides units of functionality that modify the behavior of the API Gateway without the need to implement code. These management components are know in 3scale as policies. The configuration for the bundled policies is available from the API Manager Portal, where you can define the behavior of your API integration.

The order in which the policies are executed, known as the “policy chain”, can be configured to introduce differing behavior based on the position of the policy in the chain. Adding custom headers, perform URL rewriting, enable CORS, and configurable caching are some of the most common API gateway capabilities implemented as policies.

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Red Hat Summit: An Eventful Tour from Enterprise Integration to Serverless

By Doug Tidwell May 18, 2018May 17, 2018

Red Hat Senior Architects Marius Bogoevici and Christian Posta recently presented an overview of event-driven architecture, taking the audience from the basics of enterprise integration to microservices and serverless computing. Standing in front of a packed room at Red Hat Summit, their talk addressed four basic points:

Event-driven architectures have been around for a while. What are they, why are they powerful, and why are back en vogue?
Messaging is often used as a backbone for event-based distributed systems. What options do we have for cloud-native event-driven architectures?
Integration is necessary for any organization. How do streaming, cloud-native architectures, and microservices fit in?
Are Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) the next utopian architecture? Where do functions fit in a world of microservices?

The entire session was done with three enterprise concerns in mind. First is the divide between agile systems and purpose-built systems. While the purpose-built system is optimized for a small set of use cases, it is very difficult to change if new use cases arise or the old use cases become irrelevant. We have to be agile to adapt to a constantly changing environment. Another concern is resource utilization. We want to eliminate waste and get the most out of our systems and resources, although the cloud in general and containers in particular make more distributed architectures practical. Finally, Christian made the observation that we cannot build complex systems from complex parts. The components we develop must be as simple and understandable as possible.

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Blog Articles

Monitoring Red Hat AMQ 7

What’s in Fuse 7?

What is a Policy?