You can develop service applications that, when deployed onto WebSphere ESB, enable message-based communication between services and can operate on and manipulate messages in flight between interaction endpoints.
You can develop some service components using other application development tools then import them into WebSphere Integration Developer for modelling, editing, testing, and packaging for deployment into WebSphere ESB.
Deploying is the act of enabling your applications in either a test or a production environment. While the concept of deploying is the same for both environments, there are a few differences between the deployment task in each environment.
After developing a service application, best practices state that you should deploy the application onto a test server for testing before committing it to the production requirement. Use WebSphere Integration Developer to deploy the applications into a test environment, and to package a service application as a standard enterprise application package, for deployment into WebSphere ESB.
Use WebSphere ESB to install and deploy the applications into a production environment. In WebSphere ESB, you can use the standard WebSphere administrative console, with role-based administration views that simplify the experience for solution administrators to deploy and manage the components of service integration packages.