Chapter 2. Introduction

This book has been written for developers wanting to work with the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform's BPEL Engine.

Read this book in order to learn how to work with the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform's Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) Engine. It is assumed that your system had already been installed and configured correctly as per the instructions in the Installation and Configuration Guide.

SOA Root (often written as SOA_ROOT) is the term given to the directory that contains the application server files. In the standard version of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform package, SOA root is the jboss-soa-p-5 directory. In the Standalone edition, though, it is the jboss-soa-p-standalone-5 directory.

Throughout the documentation, this directory is frequently referred to as SOA_ROOT. Substitute either jboss-soa-p-5 or jboss-soa-p-standalone-5 as appropriate whenever you see this name.

PROFILE can be any one of the server profiles that come with the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform product: default, production, all, minimal, standard or web. Substitute one of these that you are using whenever you see "PROFILE" in a file path in this documentation.

A Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is a piece of software that is capable of running Java bytecode. The JVM creates a standard environment in which the intermediate bytecode is run. By creating the standard environment irrespective of the underlying hardware and operating system combination, it allows programmers to write their Java code once and have confidence that it can be run on any system. Red Hat recommends customers use OpenJDK as it is an open source, supported Java Virtual Machine that runs well on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. Windows users should install Oracle JDK 1.6.