ESB vs. SwitchYard

[jhd]

What are the key differences between the ESB and SwitchYard projects?  Are there any plans to drop the ESB project in favor of SwitchYard at some point in the future?

[tcunning]

Keith Babo and I did a talk on the future of the ESB at JBoss which covers the differences between ESB and SwitchYard and how to move a JBoss ESB project to SwitchYard - I hope you forgive me for just linking them here, but the slides and video go into more detail on the differences that I could ever do in a single forum post :

video : https://community.jboss.org/en/switchyard/blog/2012/10/15/switchyard-videos-and-upcoming-webcast

slides : http://www.jboss.org/dms/judcon/2012boston/presentations/judcon2012boston_day1track2session5.pdf

Both projects will continue to be actively developed in the community, both projects will be supported through SOA-P (Red Hat's enterprise SOA offering), but the key point you need to be aware of is that there is no JBoss AS 7 support planned for JBoss ESB (that's not to say that a motivated community member couldn't do this, just that there's none planned at the moment).     JBoss ESB is being actively developed in SOA-P 5 (Red Hat's enterprise SOA offering), and SOA-P 6 - which will be AS7-based - will contain SwitchYard.

[jhd]

Thanks Tom, that is good information.

[mpiraccini]

This is not a good news.

Anyway the project conversion from JBossESB to Switchyard seems to be quite mechanical...there is a chance that a toll will be developed for the automatic conversion (such as the one developed to migrate JBPM to JBPM 5?).

[kcbabo]

As Tom pointed out above, both projects are active now and will be part of supported products for quite some time.  Yes, there will be some manual work to move applications from JBoss ESB to SwitchYard when you choose to make the transition.  We are here to help in that process and we will definitely be investing time in providing advice, documentation, examples, etc. to help users make the transition (the above presentation is a first step).  It's unlikely that an automated migration script will be useful/effective, but that does not exclude the possibility of creating tools and utilities to help out.  For example, we could create a script which takes an inventory of a JBossESB application (services, gateways, routers) and then document how that can map to a new SwitchYard project.

If you want an idea of where the enterprise products based on these projects is headed, I recommend you check out the Integration Week series taking place this week.  Lots of details about the overall picture, roadmap, and technical capabilities.  All sessions have been recorded and there are still more sessions today.

http://www.redhat.com/promo/jboss_integration_week/

cheers,

keith