Chapter 15. Gateways and Connectors
15.1. Introduction to Gateways and Connectors
Introduction
Not all clients interacting with the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform will be able to understand its native protocols and message format. As such there is a need to be able to bridge between ESB-aware end-points (those that understand JBossESB) and ESB-unaware end-points (those that do not understand JBossESB). Such bridging technologies have existed for many years in a variety of distributed systems and are referred to as gateways and connectors.
It is important for legacy interoperability scenarios that a SOA infrastructure allow ESB-unaware clients to use ESB-aware services, or ESB-aware clients to use ESB-unaware services. One of the features of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is the ability to allow a wide variety of clients and services to interact, including those that were not written using JBossESB or, indeed, any ESB. There is an abstract notion of an interoperability bus in JBossESB so that end-points which are not ESB-aware can still be plugged into the bus.
