First look at WSO2 ESB

Earlier this year I promised myself to educate me on the open source offerings for ESB's and BPM products out in the field.

As you may have noticed I took a first step into Mule ESB recently, a product that clearly suprises me, even though it is quite cumbersome to work with since it requires some fiddling around with XML files and a quite comprehensive stack of XML schemas. I guess it'll all become second nature to you once you get the hang of it.

Well, today I downloaded WSO2 ESB for the first time and my initial impression was just "WOW!". I knew that the guys at WSO2 are experts in their field, but for being an open source offering this product just instantly blew me away.

Right out of the box you have a solution with features such as Web management, tracing and statistics, pattern catalogs, registry, EIP support for advanced features such as splitting and aggregation, transformation options (XSLT, XQuery, Smooks, Custom java/ruby just to name a few) as well as the option to add in extra transport adapters as you see fit. And so the list goes on...

I've not yet scoured the full transport offerings, but to me it seems that Mule certainly has an upper hand when it comes to out-of-the box transports. But WSO2 wins my heart any day when it comes to manageability and ease of use.

I also noticed that WSO2 has it's own IDE plugins to Eclipse which is always handy. I'm currently downloading it and hope to see if it eases the integration configuration even more.

I'll also take a quick look into the BPEL editor and their runtime to see what's in store in that area as well.

So, have you used WSO2 ESB or any other Carbon products? If so, how do you compare it to other OS offerings such as Mule, JBoss, ServiceMix, Camel etc? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the stack since it does not matter how many bells and whistles it brings if it has not been proved in production.