Open ESB

OpenESB is a Java-based open source enterprise service bus. It can be used as a platform for both Enterprise Application Integration and Service Oriented Application. OpenESB allows you to integrate legacy systems, external and internal partners and new development in your Business Process. OpenESB is the unique open-source ESB relying on standard JBI (Java Business Integration), XML, XML Schema, WSDL, BPEL and Composite application that provides you with simplicity, efficiency, long-term durability, and savings on your present and future investments with a very low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

It used to be owned by Sun Microsystems, but after Oracle and Sun Microsystems merged (see: Sun acquisition by Oracle), the OpenESB Community was created to maintain, improve, promote and support OpenESB.

Architecture

OpenESB consists of 5 parts: the framework, the container, the components,the Integrated Development Environment and the development plugins.

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  OpenESB main parts

Framework

The framework consists of a lightweight JBI implementation in Java. This implementation is container-agnostic and can work on any platform and any container. Even if development and support are mainly focused on Glassfish V2 and V3 platforms, beta projects on JBoss and standalone [Java virtual machine | JVM] work well and are in progress (2012 Q2). In addition to the OpenESB framework being lightweight, it is also reliable and highly scalable. It is embedded in a Java virtual machine and communicates with other framework instances through Binding components. This architecture matches perfectly with new cloud architectures and allows easy deployment and management on very complex infrastructures. The framework is fully manageable with any JMX-based tool such as Jconsole or more sophisticated tools like Opsview or Nagios. The framework implements a virtual bus known as the Normalised Message Router (NMR). This is a powerful asynchronous intelligent communication channel between components.

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  JBI high level schema

Components

The JBI specification defines 2 component types: The services engine (SE) and the binding component (BC). The SE and BC implement the same interface contract, however, they behave differently:

- Binding components act as the interface between the outside world and the bus, being able to generate bus messages upon receipt of stimuli from an external source, or generate an external action/interaction in response to a message received from the bus.

- Service engines receive messages from the bus and send messages to the bus. SE’s have no direct contact with the outside world. They rely on the bus for interaction with other components, whether binding components or other service engines.

OpenESB includes 'out of the box' many Components.

OpenESB Binding components

OpenESB Service Engines

Integrated Development Environment & Plugins

OpenESB offers a set of graphical tools to ease complex SOA and integration developments. Powerful XLM, XML Schema, WSDL, BPEL editor, data mapping and Composition Applications graphical editors are proposed with OpenESB. Similarly, build, deploy, un-deploy, run, test and debug tasks are managed by graphical tools. OpenESB provides the best ergonomics for ESB and SOA developments.

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  XSD Editor

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  WSDL Editor

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  BPEL Editor

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  Complex BPEL sample

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  Data Mapper Editor

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  Composite Application Editor

Container

At present, OpenESB comes with Glassfish V2 as a container. OpenESB on Glassfish is reliable, easily manageable and very scalable with or without Clusters. A benchmark on a 10 € per day machine on the cloud showed that OpenESB processes more than 10 million complex messages on an elaborate multichannel complex business-to-business process (File, FTP, SOAP, JMS). At the same time, it generates more than 12 million complex messages for external partners. benchmark report. With an extra configuration effort, OpenESB runs on JBoss V4 and V5 and set up for production uses. Today, OpenESB development is focused on new containers Glassfish V3-V4, JBoss V7, OSGI. Next versions are planned for 2013.

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  Containers available for OpenESB

OpenESB kick-off

This section helps you to get started with OpenESB. OpenESB can be downloaded here. For those new to OpenESB, we suggest you use the last stable version. Dozens of papers and tutorials on OpenESB can be found on the documentation web page.

• Installation guide (Pymma)
• Hello World (Pymma)
• Gentle introduction to OpenESB (Oracle)
• How to create a simple HL7 Sender and Receiver Project (LogiCoy)

OpenESB community

The table below lists the web sites and forum managed by OpenESB community

See also

• Service-oriented architecture
• System integration
• Enterprise Service Bus
• Enterprise Integration Patterns
• Event-driven SOA

References

Java Business Integration

JBI specification

External links

• OpenESB project
• LogiCoy OpenESB Development, Consulting and Global 24x7 Support
• Pymma consulting OpenESB consulting, training, architecture design and development
• Neva OpenESB openESB consulting and development