A 'Good' ESB Should....

As technologies like SOA and Web Services continue to become more and more dominant mechanisms for implementing complex distributed systems, the demand for efficient and reliable enterprise service bus middleware is becoming larger and larger. There are dozens of potential ESB solutions out there, some open source and some proprietary, but the cold hearted truth is most of these products have a number of short comings, which makes them totally useless in production environments. Production environments don't require fast ESBs. They need ultra fast ESBs that can handle thousands of concurrent user requests. such deployments require middleware which can satisfy scalability and availability requirements through features such as load balancing, clustering and fail over support. A good ESB should also be capable of dealing with many communication protocols, transport mechanisms and messaging standards.

Fortunately we are not totally out of hope. There are some really good products out there which give you all the above mentioned features and deliver 100% in production deployments. WSO2 ESB is certainly one of those middleware solutions which is fast, reliable and feature rich. It is based on Apache's tried and tested Apache Synapse light weight ESB and starting from version 2.0 it is also based on WSO2's revolutionary Carbon framework.

WSO2 folks recently published a cool flash presentation which walks us through all the basic features of WSO2 ESB within a few minutes. Have a look and see whether your ESB delivers at least half of the things the WSO2 ESB provides.