Making decisions in the ESB / Workflow / Mediation space
We have been evaluating different available technologies in
this space for a large project. The project, at its core, is a need
to orchestrate web services (sync and async). The enterprise needs involve the
ability to move large digital files globally, along with metadata related to those files.
We have found it difficult to really evaluate different ways of implementing this, other than
looking at high level features published by various projects / products / etc.
It's seems that without doing a somewhat involved POC using a few chosen platforms, we really won't
have the information / experience that we need to make a good decision on which pieces to use.
Add in the cost of various support licenses vs. no licenses, etc, etc, and things get even more cloudy.
This seems to just be the nature of the beast.
So after some time spent looking at different options I am left with a few questions that perhaps some experts
here could shed some light on. Or set me straight if I'm completely off base.
We started down the road that we wanted to use BPEL (because it's a standard) to implement the workflow that
ties the services together. However, it seems that all the java based BPEL products out there use apache ODE
under the covers. From what I can gather, ODE doesn't really support calling REST services from a workflow.
Looks like something that is under consideration for a future release:
http://ode.apache.org/roadmap.html
http://ode.apache.org/bpel-extensions.html
That means that if we go the BPEL route, we need to then use some type of ESB product so that we can proxy the REST services
from the esb with a wsdl. Correct? (which defeats the whole purpose of REST)
As alternative #1, use Mule/WSo2/ServiceMix(FuseSource) - implementing the workflow in manner supported by each:
Mule: homegrown?
WSo2: based on synapse
Service Mix: Camel
As alternative #2, use synapse or camel to implement the workflow on our own and deploy into Tomcat, adding pieces
from alternative #1 if we need them.
Do I sound like I'm in a rational spot for my three potential paths? Are there large things I'm not considering?
Any advice / thoughts are greatly appreciated.
