Hello Cape Clear 6!

I was playing around with Cape Clear 6, an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), to understand web services better and to get to know the concepts of an ESB. My first impression was that it was remarkably easy to understand and use. Though I only went through the Hello World tutorial, I thought the concepts of Design, Develop, Deploy and Test were mapped clearly to the product GUI. Following are the points that I learnt from the Hello World tutorial on building web services. The corresponding phases in the Web Services Development cycle are mentioned within brackets in bold.

1. Generate a WSDL (Design)
2. Add operations in the WSDL for accepting request and sending a response (Design)
3. Generate Java server code (Develop)
4. Edit the server code to add business logic corresponding to step 2 (Develop)
5. Rebuild the server jar (Develop)
6. Deploy the web service (includes packaging the server jar file into a WSAR) (Deploy)
7. Generate and deploy a JSP web client for testing the web service (Deploy)
8. Test the web service through the JSP web client (Test)

The next task is to actually build a BPEL based Orchestration Service and use Cape Clear 6 as an ESB. BPEL - Business Process Execution Language based on WSDL, would probably replace Java in steps 3 and 4 mentioned above. An XML based language that can actually be executed, should be fun!