The added value of jBossESB

[spike_s]

Hi,

I am new to the world of JbossESB. We are evaluation some ESB solutions to adopt it in the context of an SOA architecture of our IS. I must say that I cannot see any real added value of jBossESB, at its core, it's a Messaging infrastructure. We are exposing web services (for know) in our IS (no Legacy) and using another internal service via a JCA adaptor, and we want to orchestrat and monitor business process. So knowing this, can you explain to me the practical benefits of using jBossESB in our context, or to put it another way, what can jBossESB do that adds some value to our architecture in comparaison to a direct approach or other tools?

Regards

[burrsutter]

Hello,

If your requirements are to simply manage and orchestrate web services and specifically monitor business process then it sounds like you simply need a BPEL engine which typically runs as a service in the context of an application server.

jBPM has a BPEL download that is currently in beta.
Active Endpoints also has a BPEL download as well.

An ESB can be paired with a BPEL/BPM engine as JBoss ESB 4.2 will be.

Now JBoss ESB 4.2 has several features which might be of interest such as:
- Support for WS
- BPEL engine integration with Active Endpoints
- JPDL engine integration (allows for human work-flow)
- Improved content-based routing/filtering
- Improved synchronous invocation handling
- and much more
While JBoss ESB 4.0 already had:
- Numerous transport connectors
- transformation engine
- action pipeline/chain
- automated registry
- event/message store
- static & content-based routing
- hot deployment of services
- EIPs: Splitter, Aggregator

The book Enterprise Integration Patterns identifies a number of the expectations of enterprise caliber integration-oriented middleware. While there is nothing like J2EE which defines an ESB, the EIP book is a fairly good recipe for building SOA-based middleware technology.

Does that help?

Burr

[dvincen]

Hi,

is there a feature list availble which standards, esb features, whatever is listed?

Best regards
Daniel

[bsheward]

Spike_S,

I had some of the same concerns, my thread is listed at http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=107011.

Hope that helps!

Barry

[spike_s]

Thanks Barry. Indeed, a great answer to my questions :)

Regards