breakingwoods Official Blog: Introducing breakingwoods

Introduction

First of all, the main objective of this project is to be a source of new ideas, resources, components and actions for JBoss ESB. Nobody is interested in creating a fork (or anything like that), but we believe that it could be a nice way to contribute to the evolution of this incredible project, as well as to be an accurate information source and filter for candidate components to be integrated into the core JBoss ESB project.

At breakingwoods, anybody will be able to contribute. All contributions are welcome, whether that be a new ESB component, a review of an existing compoenent, ideas, fixes, testing etc... all will be really appreciated The only thing you need is a Gmail/Google account.

Freedom to Contribute

Everybody at the breakingwoods's team believes that JBoss ESB is a very robust solution, but would be even better if we would add more Adapters, Listeners, Gateways (in JBoss ESB it might be the same), as well as new Actions. The same happened with another popular opensource ESB solution: Mule, made by MuleSource. The Mule community has Mule Forge, which is an extension's repository for MuleESB. We hope that breakingwoods can be exactly the same for JBoss ESB, offering lots of components, and showing valuable information about which new ideas are rocking or the most downloaded, rated, commented etc.

Why this project is not hosted under JBoss.ORG?

Firstly we would like to make the project strong in its own right. Once it is hosted at Google, we hope people will feel comfortable enough to contribute with whatever they want, once it is not so close to the crowd and the spotlight. Nevertheless, maybe in the future, we could move from Google Code to JBoss.ORG. This will depend of the success of this initiative. Alternatively, it could be great to have it isolated.

How can I contribute?

There are several ways in which you can help to make this project a success:

To Propose / To Create / To Review/ To test: New Adapters/Gateways/Listeners
To Propose / To Create / To Review/ To test: New ESB Actions
To Propose / To Create / To Review/ To test: New Ideas, Designs, Quickstarts

Already at breakingwoods:

esbgen: A basic CLI tool similar to seam-gen. Helps you create the first esb project.
TwitterAction: Action for publishing an ESB Message in Twitter.
EMailListener: Periodically polls in the configured e-mail account, publishing incoming emails to JBoss ESB as an ESB Message.
Google Spreadsheet Listener: Connects to Spreadsheets hosted by GoogleDocs, publishing new records to JBoss ESB.
Apache DBUtils: Action that executes plain SQLs.

There are new Actions and Listeners in the pipeline. The following are some of the next Listeners we are planning. Maybe you will be able to help:

Apache Camel Listener/ Action
SalesForce Listener / Action
Infinispan Listener/ Action
Terracota Listener / Action
AMQP Listener/Action
Where is yours ? :)

We are working in some of these, so stay tuned, as lots of good things will appear here at this project.

Another good point, is that most of these components will be compatible to JBoss SOA Platform. Obviously Red Hat will not support problems regarding SalesForce, Terracota or anything that is not part of the JBoss SOA-P supported distribution. However, you will still be able to add these components into your solutions, possibly reducing your development time and increasing your productivity.

If you have chance, check it out here: http://code.google.com/p/breakingwoods/

Enjoy one of the best things about open source development: "To learn with others essentially doing something useful".