h1. What is Petals Platform?

Petals Platform is a middleware solution suite of open source software consisting of:
- Petals ESB - the enterprise service bus (core component of the Petals Platform) including many components (Petals components) for messages transport and transformation, mediation protocols and reliability mechanisms, all using common and open standards.
- Petals Studio - integrated development environment (IDE), based on Eclipse with creation wizards, editors, validators and graphical designers for the Petals ESB environment.
- Petals View - business activity monitoring for Petals Platform.
- Petals Master - a governance toolset to improve utility and productivity of your services architecture.

The combined capabilities of these tools make Petals Platform a complete solution for seamless integration and SOA projects.

The Petals Platform is an open source collaboration with the enterprise open source developer community lead by {multi-excerpt:name=petalslink}{toggle-cloak:id=petalslink}Petals Link.
{cloak:id=petalslink|hidden=true}
{em}As the leading European open source Enterprise Service Bus vendor and consultancy for open source SOA integration, Petals Link has market-leading expertise in enterprise application integration and application data sharing. Our goal is to help organisations to design, deploy and manage a modern information system: flexible, agile and interoperable.
Petals Link has already provided its services to more than fifty companies and administrations.
Our core technology, Petals ESB, is used in Telecommunications (Orange), Defense & Security (French Air Force, French General Directorate for Armament), Health (Cegedim Activ, Almerys) and Public administrations (DGME, URSSAF, General Councils of Gironde and Limousin, City of Lyon).{em}
[http://www.petalslink.com]

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{toggle-cloak:id=light powerful|exclusive=true}{important}Light & Powerful{important}
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{toggle-cloak:id=standard open-source|exclusive=true}{important}Standard & Open Source{important}
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{toggle-cloak:id=configuration|exclusive=true}{important}Ease of configuration{important}
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{toggle-cloak:id=administration|exclusive=true}{important}Ease of administration{important}
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{toggle-cloak:id=business monitoring|exclusive=true}{important}Business-oriented monitoring{important}
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{toggle-cloak:id=business management|exclusive=true}{important}Business-oriented management{important}
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[See detailed Petals Platform Features list|Petals Platform Features]

h3. Modern enterprise needs

As a extensible platform revolving around an open source Enterprise Service Bus, Petals Platform can cover traditional needs as well as more ambitious projects. Most companies / organisations have three typical needs nowaday:

- Application integration: connecting heterogeneous applications to share data or features, automate some processes, in overall lessening the human intervention in data processing.
- Mediation platform: exposing data and/or services outside one's infrastructure, to allow employees to work in travelling, providing online services to clients or partners, to gather data from external sources...
- Flexible infrastructure: being able to adapt services, processes or modifying software composition (like, replacing a business-oriented solution for a more performant one) without impacting the running infrastructure.

The two first needs are being covered for years, with the help of EAI (Enterprise Applications Integrations) solutions, ancestors of today's {toggle-cloak:id=ESB history}Enterprise Service Buses.
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A typical SOA project using Petals Platform could be as such:

h6. +Phase 1: Building a small-range project to integrate Petals ESB in your infrastructure, and learn its use.+

# Draw the "map" of your infrastructure, so you can see where you start from. (Chief Information Officer)
# Define a simple case in which you could use Petals ESB (interconnect two applications, expose a service through a webportal, chain several applications's features as services to create a business process. (SOA Architect / Project Manager)
# Deploy Petals ESB and necessary components with the Petals Webconsole. (Developer)
# Create necessary services, thanks to Petals Studio. (Developer)
# If necessary, orchestrate the services to create a business process. (???)
# If planned, expose the resulting process. (???)
# Set up notifications on desired exchanges (Developer)
# Configure Petals View to monitor and retrieve desired information for further exploitation (Business Analyst)
With this, a specific part of the infrastructure has been made flexible, interoperable, SOA-ready.
# Deploy Petals Master, to set the bases for a good SOA-oriented management: build services index, create companies/users/roles, associate these data to related services.

With this, you have set up a fully functional environment with SOA capabilities, while keeping complexity and resources consumption to a low level, thanks to limited field of implementation.

h6. +Phase 2: Once the container is installed, and you gained design/configuration knowledge, you can expand your SOA integration on a step-by-step basis, depending on needs and resources.+

# Define another use-case, in same or another business department.
# Check the Petals Master's database to find any reusable service.
# Deploy new components if necessary.
# Build services and orchestrate them.
# Set up messages notifications
# Configure related monitoring in Petals View