Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Commercial ESBs
In this section, we'll examine a variety of ESB products. These products do much of what the
open source products do and generally add features around ease of use, integration with oth-
er products on their platforms (such as IDEs or repositories), and of course performance and
reliability claims. In many cases, they are not cheap; some of the ESBs in Gartner's magic
quadrant can run more than $75,000 per processor.
Some of the leading ESBs on the market include the following:
▪ IBM WebSphere ESB and DataPower.
▪ Sonic ESB. They were one of the first in the business, and their chief technology evan-
gelist is David Chappell, author of EnterpriseServiceBus(O'Reilly) (
http://oreilly.com/
▪ TIBCO BusinessWorks and ActiveMatrix Grid.
▪ Cape Clear. They offer two versions of their ESB, one that is standalone and another that
can be integrated with IBM WebSphere.
▪ iWay Software. This New York-based software company offers an adapter-based ESB that
is capable of wrapping IBM CICS, Tuxedo, and .NET applications natively.
At this point, because ESBs can differ in functionality and features more than, say, the applic-
ation servers we might be used to, let's look at a few of the large stack vendor's ESB products
to see what differentiates them.
Oracle Service Bus
BEA released AquaLogic Service Bus 3.0 in late 2007. After Oracle bought BEA in the
middle of 2008, the bus was rebranded to Oracle Service Bus (OSB) 10.3. Before Oracle pur-
chased BEA, it sold an ESB of its own called Oracle Enterprise Service Bus. The current
statements from Oracle indicate that product will continue to be supported, but will not be the
“strategic” ESB that Oracle will promote going forward.
OSB differentiating features
Oracle Service Bus is available as a free 875 MB download from
Oracle's website
. It has a
number of features that differentiate it from other service buses on the market, including open
source ESBs. Let's briefly look at them here:
