Small things matter; whether packaging and deployment are smaller concerns compared to design and development, is still under dispute. However, one thing is clear, that a standard way of packaging and deployment promotes cross-platform and cross-vendor portability of components, whether it is our familiar .jar, .war, and .rar files or the new JBI archive defined by the JBI specification.

ServiceMix is a container for JBI components. At the same time the ServiceMix JBI container by itself is a JBI component. This characteristic enables ServiceMix to be deployed as a standard JBI component into another vendor's ESB container, provided the host ESB container supports JBI components. This is similar to a java.awt.Frame which is a component that you can include in a container. At the same time, the Frame by itself is a container which can contain other components. ServiceMix is analogous to our Frame example.

When we say a ServiceMix container is a JBI component...