This book as one of a few sources of information for IT architects as well as integration developers who wish to use an open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The book provides the introduction to the two open source ESB’s - Mule and ServiceMix ESBs - with plenty of examples. In this review we looked at the following points:
In order to provide the reader with sufficient information with regards to the conceptual underpinning of the discussed topics and components, we also provided the generic explanation of each component discussed in this book.
In some chapters, we have decided to visit appropriate websites and bring them into the context of this book content.
What You Need to Know About SOA Before You Start Reading this Review
The emergence of web services technology and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has introduced several issues and challenges one has to be aware of in all stages of SOA projects. The concept of service is understood as a repeatable business task. Service Oriented refers to the effort aimed at integrating business processes by linking the services together and delivering the complete a solution.
Services can be seen as tasks in the business process. They are loosely coupled, the access is provided via their well defined interfaces, they are stateless and independent of technology. Within this framework, the important part of SOA is its backbone called Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). ESB implements the logic needed for a single client view, supports wide range of connectivity protocols and provides necessary routing and transformation of messages exchanged among many services to accomplish the tasks required by business processes the ESB integrates .
There are many open source ESBs on the market, for example Apache Synapse, Apache Tuscany, JBI based ChainBuilder, FUSE ESB, JBoss ESB, OpenAdapter, Open ESB, PETALS, Spring Integration, and WSO2 ESB. This book selected two ESBs - Mule (http://servicemix.apache.org/home.html).
There are also commercial ESBs available such as IBM’s WebSphere Process Server, TIBCO, Microsoft, Oracle. BEA Systems, Inc. recently announced the new family of products for service infrastructure, named AquaLogic which is BEA's implementation of the Enterprise Service Bus combined with Web services management capabilities.