Just like an EJB component lives in an EJB container, a JBI component lives in a JBI container. A JBI container provides hosting facilities for a JBI component and control the life cycle of the component. Multiple vendors provide their own implementations of the JBI container.

ServiceMix is the one we have seen here in detail, which we will be continuing in this book for the purpose of showing JBI using examples. Just like the scenario you have already seen in this chapter of binding an external HTTP service to the JBI container, we can also bind many other protocols and formatted components to the JBI container, thus providing a Service Workbench at the JBI container-level. However, the interesting part to be noted is that even before JBI, we have been doing binding and integration of different kinds of services in multiple ways.

The next chapter is devoted to re-look at how we have been doing things, without a full fledged JBI container. This will help you to get a broader picture...