At the very heart of JBoss ESB 4.0 is a Transformation Service built on the Smooks Framework.
Smooks has enabled JBoss ESB to provide a very powerful transformation solution for both XML and non-XML data formats. It has enabled JBoss ESB to offer a transformation solution that supports Transformation Management across a large and varied/complex enterprise message set.
JBoss has built a Transformation Administration Console as part of the Core ESB. This tool acts as a user friendly window on top of Smooks, tailored specifically for the ESB "Message Exchange" usage model. There are a number of very interesting Flash demonstrations of this console up on JBoss Labs:
- A demo of the basics
- A detailed demo showing how to perform an EDI to XML transformation in JBoss ESB. This demo shows how Smooks enables JBoss ESB to perform complex transformations, by allowing it to leverage the technologies that most suit the characteristics of the transformation "problem" being solved (EdiSax, Groovy and XSLT).