Monday, October 06, 2008

[Arch] OpenSource ESBs

The last couple of years major Open Source ESBs, including MuleSource and ServiceMix, have been expanded and are used in critical business solutions. Tijs Rademakers and Jos Dirksen offer a book which gives an overview about Open Source ESBs and which combination of Open Source technologies with ESBs are used. The main open source solutions covered in this book are Mule and ServiceMix. Therefore most of the examples in the book are based on these two technologies. Other Open Source ESBs that will be covered are Apache Synapse, Open ESB and the new integration framework from Spring, called Spring Integration.

In the TechBrief the authors mentioned that all Open Source ESBs focus on Enterprise Integration Pattersn. If you understand these patterns its very easy to understand the implementation and handling of ESBs.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part concentrates on reader which are not familiar with an ESB:
  • Overview about ESB functionality and what Open Source ESBs are available in the Open Source market
  • Taking a deep look into the Mule and ServiceMix architecture
  • Installation of Mule and ServiceMix and how to run them
The second part focus on ESB core functioanlity which covers some of the Enterprise Integration Patterns. Here the reader becomes some connector examples, like JMS, JDBC, POP3 and Web Services.

The third part covers case studies and also illustrates integration scenarios with BPM engines, like jBPM and Apache ODE.

In the tech brief there was also a short comparison between Mule and Service Mix. When to use which one, is hard to say, it depends on your requirements. But in this interview on of the authors said that in a web service based architecture the JBI approach is often the better choice, but Mule is very often used, because you can also transfer Java objects, which is often very comfortable and faster. They also talk about integration of legacy systems, which is sometimes easier with Mule, because when you use Service Mix all messages must be transformed in XML.

You can download chapter 1 and chapter 4 for the book homepage.

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