Refactoring J2EE Application for JBI-Based ESB: A Case Study

Enterprise service bus (ESB) plays an important role in enterprise SOA, and Java business integration (JBI) is the standard for Java based ESBs. As enterprises adopt ESB as the integration hub, how to preserve and leverage existing J2EE assets becomes an important question. While most ESBs allow J2EE applications to be deployed as-is, refactoring these applications allows them to take advantage of many service provided by the ESB platform and prompts service reuse. We will discuss our experience with a major US federal agencypsilas SOA efforts where a legacy J2EE application was refactored to be integrated in a JBI environment. We will also show how infrastructure concerns such quality of services (QoS) were moved from the J2EE application to the JBI container.