Cape Clear Studio 7.5 What's New

Cape Clear 7.5 introduces the concept of "Assemblies" which represent a configurable message processing chain consisting of reusable components such as transports, loggers, message transformers, validators, message routers and error handlers - all wired together to define a required business process. Assemblies are Spring-based and defined within an assembly.xml file which makes them easily extensible and cusomisable. Cape Clear provide a graphical Assembly Editor to make it simple to create Assemblies by dragging and dropping components onto an assembly diagram and configure their properties without needing to edit the underlying XML source directly.

The main features of Assemblies are as follows:

Read the “Introducing Assemblies and the Assembly Editor” and “Assembly Overview” sections within the Cape Clear online documentation for more details on the Assembly Editor and the underlying assembly XML.

Cape Clear 7.5 contains many new and updated samples which demonstrate the various new features (including assemblies) within the product. These samples are accessible from the Samples page in the Eclipse Welcome screen. See “Accessing the Samples”.

Cape Clear 7.5 now includes support for creating BPEL Partner Links to REST-style Web services. These are created using a HTTP Partner Link wizard that enables users to create the necessary partner link that describes a REST-style Web service and allows it to be invoked from within a BPEL process. See “HTTP Partner Links”.

JUnit tests for mediations defined within an assembly can be created using a new JUnit wizard. See “Creating JUnit Tests”.

Web service requests coming from each individual users are now logged separately and it is possible to associate messages and process instances with a specific customer ID. The Cape Clear Orchestration Manager has been updated to support on-demand monitoring of individual customer requests. Each process now contains a customerID field and instances can now be searched and sorted based on this value. See “Client Segmentation”.

BPEL scripts can now be documented and notes viewed within the BPEL editor. See “Adding Documentation for Activities”.

The Orchestration Manager now supports two new ways of dealing with process instances that have failed or are in an inconsistent state due to an incomplete process definition. The Orchestration Manager allows the administrator to explicitly fail a process. This has the effect of cancelling further processing of the instance. The Orchestration Manager also allows the administrator to replay failed, active, or completed process instances by redelivering all or selected messages to a process. See See “Marking Process Instances as Failed” and See “Replaying a Process Instance in Orchestration Manager” for more details.

To help manage the size of the BPEL database and keep performance optimum, a new command-line utility named ccarchiver has been introduced to make it possible to query a BPEL database for specific BPEL process instances and archive them to another database or the file system (either as XML or ZIP files). The ccarchiver utility also works in reverse, that is, process instances that have been backed up to file or another database can be re-inserted back into the original database. It is also possible to reduce the volume of information archived for each process to just specific headline information (such as process instance ID, status, and timing details for example). Completed processes can also be pruned from the database in order to further reduce the volume of information stored. See “Managing Your BPEL Database” for full details of the utility. This archiving facility will also be available as a cc-bpelarchiver Web service and can be scheduled to run automatically on a regular basis.

The Cape Clear Web Service Tester now has support for JMS and can be used to send messages (with attachments) to a JMS provider. Some configuration needs to be done within the Web Service Tester in order to register the connection details of the target JMS provider. Once setup, delivering a message to a JMS provider is done by specifying the address of the JMS queue or topic in the Location field. The format should be jms:[topic|queue]:[queue name|topic name], for example: jms:queue:queue/A. Any responses will be displayed in the Response pane as normal. See “Sending a Message to a JMS Provider” for more details.

The Copy dialog used within the BPEL Editor has been completely redesigned to provide comprehensive support for schema and better literal creation capabilities. See “Adding an Assign”.

The WS-Tester now allows the user to specify a WS-Security XML configuration file to be used to secure the outgoing request. See “Using the Web Service Tester”.

Cape Clear 7.5 has extended the capability of exposing relational databases as Web services to include database stored procedures. See “Exposing Database Stored Procedures as Web Services Using Cape Clear Studio and Hibernate”.

The WS-Tester sample-creation code has been very significantly enhanced to support more schema constructs.

Testing using the WS-Tester or invoking a Java WS-client from Eclipse now auto-installs server certificates into Studio.