This week’s issue of eWeek features a comparative review of ESB products, including open-source offerings. eWeek Labs Director Jim Rapoza summarizes: “The Sonic ESB platform defined the ESB category, and Version 7.0 is the most mature and capable ESB available; Sonic ESB, coupled with the Sonic SOA Suite, is a powerful services platform.”
The feature can be found online at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1997940,00.asp. It has nice things to say about each product, but also has a few digs for each one. I have included some excerpts from the article that I found interesting -
From the summary -
Cape Clear Software’s Cape Clear ESB 6.6
This ESB offering provides good developer and BPM tools, as well as strong standards support (www.capeclear.com)
Iona Technologies’ Artix 4.0
An ESB platform that provides simple-to-use tool sets with powerful integration capabilities (www.iona.com)
Sonic Software’s Sonic ESB 7.0
The Sonic ESB platform defined the ESB category, and Version 7.0 is the most mature and capable ESB available; Sonic ESB, coupled with the Sonic SOA Suite, is a powerful services platform (www.sonicsoftware.com)
From the Article -
Cape Clear -
…Cape Clear also comes with a Web-based management console for viewing activity on the ESB server and for performing actions such as defining routing options. While we like this interface for the areas it works in, it could use more options for BPM (business process management) and routing.
Sonic ESB -
…It’s often great to be a pioneer, and Sonic Software can certainly make that claim in the areas of messaging, Web services and ESBs.
…Over time, one benefit of being a pioneer is accrued experience in the field and a set of mature and time-tested products.
…Like its competitors, Workbench now includes improved interfaces for creating BPEL-based process orchestrations, and it also has some very nice, almost-BPM-level features for managing and testing processes within the ESB environment…
Iona Artix -
…With an Eclipse-everywhere philosophy, Artix now also bases its management console on Eclipse. Using this interface, we were able to access all of our containers and messaging options, but it was not the most user-friendly ESB management interface we’ve ever seen. It’s possible that Eclipse is better suited for development than management.
…Another big improvement in Artix 4.0–necessary to catch up with other ESBs–is the addition, by default, of the ActiveMQ open-source JMS. [DC - This is a good thing? All JMS implementations are not created equal.]
Open Source ESB (Celtix and Mule)
…Celtix is backed by and uses code provided by Iona, though it is completely unrelated to Iona’s Artix ESB.
…However, both Celtix and Mule are mainly engines, and organizations looking for advanced interfaces such as those provided by commercial ESBs will probably be disappointed. Both products offer plug-in options for the Eclipse development environment, but we found the plug-ins fairly basic in form, serving mostly to assist in accessing the ESB during services development.
Dave
I get the feeling from reading the open source portion that they didn't really review things too in depth. It would be nice if someone included a more indepth overview of what it took to do several practical things with the different ESBs.
XML.com, this guy's contributions have crossed the line from journalism to advertorials to plain self-promotion a long time ago. How much is Sonic paying XML.com to promote its products? I hope it's worth it.
Dear anonymous,
This has been my blog site hosted by O'Reilly for over 4 years. Its a service that O'Reilly offers to its book authors. Sonic does not pay anything to XML.com. There are, btw, thousands of people out there who are tracking the ESB product category and are interested in hearing about what's happening. If there's a product review posted in eWeek that shows Sonic as being favorable, of course I'm going to brag about it. Also, as it is my blog site, I can post anything I please and its your choice to read it or not. Because of my many travels and meeting people all around the world through the SOA Architect forums, there are also lots of people out there who are genuinly interested in hearing about what countries I have visited lately, interesting photos I have taken, interesting people that I meet, and what I'm doing next.
One thing that may be causing confusion about this is a few months ago O'Reilly made a change to their blogging system such that everything I post gets automatically dumped to XML.com. There is no way to filter out personal stuff or have a "general" category that I can figure out. I asked O'Reilly about this last week and I'm still waiting for a response.
I would be happy to keep the postings to XML.com as strictly XML technical and industry related things provided I had another place to bucket the rest of the stuff. It would be nice if there was a category that was just related to SOA while we're at it. Even so, I would still post this entry there because I'm simply pointing out an independent product review that was done and that Sonic looked good in it.
Dave
It seems as if they left out ServiceMix. Wow, what tactics to avoid real competition...
The Sonic summary is misquoted. The article does NOT say it is "the most mature and capable ESB available."
Here is the exact text:
"Sonic ESB 7.0 Sonic Software's (www.sonicsoftware.com) capable and mature product, which pioneered the ESB space, continues to offer very powerful tools for integrating diverse business processes and systems. However, while Sonic ESB 7.0's move to a new workbench environment pays off in improved usability, it could confuse some longtime users at first."
could you give your suggestions to develop middleware that can communicate between more than two platforms