WSO2 ESB 2.1.0 Released

The WSO2 ESB team is pleased to announce the release of version 2.1.0 of the Open Source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

WSO2 ESB is a lightweight and easy-to-use Open Source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) available under theApache Software License v2.0. WSO2 ESB allows administrators to simply and easily configure message routing, intermediation, transformation, logging, task scheduling, load balancing, failover routing, event brokering, etc.. The runtime has been designed to be completely asynchronous, non-blocking and streaming based on the Apache Synapse core.

WSO2 ESB 2.1.0 is developed on top of the revolutionary Carbon platform (Middleware a' la carte), and is based on the OSGi framework to achieve the better modularity for your SOA architecture. This also contains a lots of new features and many other optional components to customize the behavior of the server. Further, if you do not want any of the built in features, you can uninstall those features without any trouble. In other words, this ESB can be customized to your SOA needs.

You can download this distribution from http://wso2.org/downloads/esb and give it a try.

How to Run

1. Extract the downloaded zip
2. Go to the bin directory in the extracted folder
3. Run the wso2server.sh or wso2server.bat as appropriate
4. Point your browser to the URL https://localhost:9443/carbon
5. Use "admin", "admin" as the username and password to login as an admin and create a user account
6. Assign the required permissions to the user through a role
7. If you need to start the OSGi console with the server use the property -DosgiConsole when starting the server. The INSTALL.txt file found on the installation directory will give you a comprehensive set of options and properties that can be passed into the startup script
8. Samples configurations can be started by the wso2esb-samples script passing the sample number with the -sn option, please have a look at the samples guide for more information, on running samples

Key Features of WSO2 ESB

• Proxy services - facilitating synchronous/asynchronous transport, interface (WSDL/Schema/Policy), message format (SOAP 1.1/1.2, POX/REST, Text, Binary), QoS (WS-Addressing/WS-Security/WS-RM) and optimization switching (MTOM/SwA).
• Non-blocking HTTP/S transports based on Apache HttpCore for ultrafast execution and support for thousands of connections at high concurreny with constant memory usage.
• Built in Registry/Repository, facilitating dynamic updating and reloading of the configuration and associated resources (e.g. XSLTs, XSD, WSDL, Policies, JS, Configurations ..)
• Easily extendable via custom Java class (mediator and command)/Spring mediators, or BSF Scripting languages (Javascript, Ruby, Groovy, etc.)
• Built in support for scheduling tasks using the Quartz scheduler.
• Load-balancing (with or without sticky sessions)/Fail-over, and clustered Throttling and Caching support
• WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, Caching & Throttling configurable via (message/operation/service level) WS-Policies
• Lightweight, XML and Web services centric messaging model
• Support for industrial standards (Hessian binary web service protocol/ Financial Information eXchange protocol and optional Helth Level-7 protocol)
• Enhanced support for the VFS(File/FTP/SFTP)/JMS/Mail transports with optional TCP/UDP transports and transport switching for any of the above transports
• Support for message splitting & aggregation using the EIP and service callouts
• Database lookup & store support with DBMediators with reusable database connection pools
• WS-Eventing support with event sources and event brokering
• Rule based mediation of the messages using the Drools rule engine
• Transactions support via the JMS transport and Transaction mediator for database mediators
• Internationalized GUI management console with user/permission management for configuration development and monitoring support with statistics, configurable logging and tracing
• JMX monitoring support and JMX management capabilities like, Gracefull/Forcefull shutdown/restart

New Features of the WSO2 ESB 2.1.0

• This ESB release is based on Carbon "Middleware a' la carte" which is an OSGi based SOA platform version 2.0 by WSO2 Inc.
• Rule based mediation via Drools
• Fine grained autherization for services via the Entitlement mediator
• Reliable-Messaging specification 1.1 support
• Enhanced WS-Eventing support and Event Sources making it an even broker
• Enhanced AJAX based sequence, endpoint and proxy service editors
• Enhanced transport configuration management through the graphical console
• Enhanced integrated registry and search functionalities with versionning, notifications, rating of resources, and commenting
• Enhanced remote registry support
• Default persistence to the registry for the configuration elements
• Enhanced permission model with the user management
• Enhanced REST/GET and other HTTP method support
• P2 based OSGi feature support, for optional features like service management, runtime governance and so on..

How You Can Contribute

Mailing Lists

Join our mailing list and correspond with the developers directly.

• Developer List : esb-java-dev@wso2.org | Subscribe | Mail Archive
• User List : esb-java-user@wso2.org | Subscribe | Mail Archive

Reporting Issues

WSO2 encourages you to report issues and your enhancement requests for the WSO2 ESB using the public JIRA.

You can also watch how they are resolved, and comment on the progress..

Discussion Forums

Alternatively, questions could be raised using the forums available.

WSO2 ESB Forum : Discussion forum for WSO2 ESB developers/users

Training

WSO2 Inc. offers a variety of professional Training Programs, including training on general Web services as well as WSO2 ESB, Apache Synapse, Apache Axis2 and number of other products.

For additional support information please refer to http://wso2.com/training/course-catalog/

Support

WSO2 Inc. offers a variety of development and production support programs, ranging from Web-based support up through normal business hours, to premium 24x7 phone support.

For additional support information please refer to http://wso2.com/support/

For more information on WSO2 ESB, visit the WSO2 Oxygen Tank (http://wso2.org)

We welcome your feedback on this implementation. Thank you for your interest in WSO2 ESB.

-- The WSO2 ESB Team --

Service hosting on an ESB?

What constitutes an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)? There is no consensus in the industry. There is no concrete definition of an ESB. Some people argue that an ESB should solely handle mediation & related functionality. Some others state that an ESB should host the real endpoints. So what would you like your ESB to look like?

Fortunately, at WSO2 we have come up with an architecture that can satisfy everybody. Here Charitha Kankanamge shows how easy it is to enable service hosting on the WSO2 Carbon architecture based WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). It takes just a matter of seconds to add new functionality or remove unnecessary functionality from your server.


Figure: JAXWS service hosting & management in WSO2 ESB

Carbon based alpha releases from WSO2

WSO2 WSAS 3.0-alpha4
WSO2 ESB 2.0-alpha2
WSO2 Business Process Server (BPS) 1.0-alpha2 (preview)
WSO2 Registry 1.5-alpha1 (preview)

You can try out these products & report issues/suggestions at the Carbon JIRA. Of course these are just for previewing only. Expect production quality releases of these products within the next few weeks.

WSO2 ESB 1.7.1 release

Ruwan Linton, one of the leading developers on WSO2 ESB & Apache Synapse, has blogged about the recent WSO2 ESB 1.7.1 release.

This release can be downloaded from http://wso2.org/downloads/esb/

Comprehensive ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) Tutorial List

Samisa has compiled a comprehensive list of tutorials on the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). In fact, this list can be considered a one-stop shop for ESB tutorials.

The WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an ultra fast, light-weight and versatile Enterprise Service Bus based on the Apache Synapse ESB. It allows you to Connect, Manage and Transform service interactions between Web services, REST/POX services and Legacy systems.

The list of articles shows how you can address several enterprise integration scenarios & concerns using WSO2 ESB. One article in particular may interest enterprise & SOA architects. This article titled "One of the Largest Managed Care Organizations Exposes its Mainframe Data & CICS Transactions using WSO2 Middleware" provides a real-world case study about one of the large health care organizations in the United States which is using WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) & WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) in production.

WSO2 ESB - Still the number 1 open source ESB in existence!

WSO2 ESB has been once again proven to be the fastest open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in existence. The latest performance benchmarking results have been published at http://wso2.org/library/3740

When we first published performance figures one year back, there was a lot of pooh-poohing from other vendors, which was expected, but none of them were able to dispute our figures or come up with better performance figures. One year is ample time to carry out performance tuning and publish performance figures, unless the products themselves have severe architectural and design constraints that do not allow this. IMHO, the competitors are facing severe architectural & design constraints, hence cannot improve performance any further.

In fact, some unbiased users, in a bid to select the best available open source ESB, ran these tests against WSO2 ESB and other leading ESBs themselves and were able to reproduce these figures. This forum post has an interesting discussion related to our performance figures against a competitor, who until recently was recognized as the market leader in the open source ESB space.

In a related blog post, Daniel Brum has compared these perf testing rounds to Formula 1 racing events, which I found to be a very interesting comparison.

Congrats to the WSO2 ESB team, and I'm sure that they will not rest until WSO2 ESB is recognized as the undisputed champion of these formula 1 races.

WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) - The fastest ESB in the world!

I recently started contributing to Apache Synapse, which is embedded by WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) has been proven to be the fastest Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in existence. WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is released under the Apache License v2.0

I submitted my first patch on WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) which improves the load balancing capabilities of Synapse. Earlier, the endpoints needed to be statically configured in the synapse.xml configuration file. The new dynamic load balancing mechanism I designed for WSO2 ESB, discovers the members in an application group using a group communication framework. The load balancer itself is part of the application groups, which allows it to detect membership changes. This was the first time I took a look at the Synapse code, and I'm very impressed by the clean design, readability and usability. There are samples that run out of the box & demonstrate all the major features of Synapse. This is a good practice that should be adopted by all projects. In fact, my ESB patch would have been incomplete if a sample had not been included. I would also like to mention that there is a very knowledgeable & helpful community backing Synapse, and the feedback I got on the mailing list has been excellent.

I hope to continue contributing to this great project and the ultra fast, light-weight and versatile Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) based on the Apache Synapse ESB would make a huge difference when it comes to performance.