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WSO2's Open Source ESB Promises Scalability

WSO2 is offering an open source enterprise service bus (ESB) for service-oriented architectures (SOAs). The company claims that its WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 1.0 product has "sub-millisecond overhead" when routing messages and that it "can scale to manage thousands of simultaneous connections."

An ESB is a middleware messaging system with capabilities such as invocation, routing, mediation, process orchestration, complex event processing, quality of service and management, according to a Wikipedia definition. It's used to support loosely coupled applications in an SOA environment, and there are many proprietary versions available. Some experts have noted that these ESBs aren't currently based on standards.

WSO2's ESB is based on the Apache Synapse 1.0 Web service and integration broker, which is a subproject of the open source Apache Web Service project.

Some features of the WSO2 ESB 1.0 include:

  • Nonblocking http/s transport to support large numbers of connections;
  • Proxy services (such as transport, interface, message format, quality of service and optimization switching) that don't require coding;
  • An integrated registry that allows ESB management without bringing down the system;
  • Throttling to maintain service level agreements;
  • AJAX Web-based administration console; and
  • Support for XSLT, XPath, Java, Ruby and Javascript.

The WSO2 ESB 1.0 works with J2EE, .NET, JMS and http/s-based systems, plus Apache Axis and Axis2 endpoints, according to an announcement issued by WSO2. The product is currently available.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is online news editor, Enterprise Group, at 1105 Media Inc.