FAQ

General questions

What is WSO2 Enterprise Integrator?

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator (WSO2 EI) is a comprehensive solution that allows you to seamlessly integrate applications, services, data and business processes to support modern enterprise integration requirements. It is the evolution of WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB) and brings together the following products and technologies that WSO2 has created for the enterprise integration domain in a single downloadable pack:

• WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB)
• WSO2 Data Services Server (WSO2 DSS)
• WSO2 Business Process Server (BPS)
• WSO2 Message Broker (MB)
• Microservices Framework for Java (MSF4J)

What's the difference between WSO2 Enterprise Integrator and WSO2 ESB?

WSO2 ESB is a fast, lightweight, and versatile enterprise service bus, which supports a variety of enterprise integration patterns. WSO2 EI is an extended version of the ESB that includes support for all the other key integration technologies as well, such as data services, micro services, business processes, business rules, application server, and message brokering.

What are the profiles included in the WSO2 Enterprise Integrator package?

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator includes the following profiles:

• ESB Profile -  Includes capabilities that were previously available with WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB) and WSO2 Data Services Server (WSO2 DSS).
• Business Process Profile - Includes capabilities that were previously available with WSO2 Business Process Server (WSO2 BPS).
• Message Broker Profile - Includes capabilities that were previously available with WSO2 Message Broker (WSO2 MB). This profile is provided to support guaranteed delivery integration scenarios and Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs). 
• Analytics Profile - Supports viewing and analyzing statistics related to the processing carried out by the ESB profile as well as the Business Process Profile.

• MSF4J profile: Supports creating microservices in Java to facilitate integration use cases.

Do I need to run each Profile of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator separately?

Yes, each profile is considered a separate runtime, and should be run separately.

What is the open source license of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator?

It is released under Apache Software License Version 2.0, one of the most business-friendly licenses available today.

Is their commercial support available for WSO2 Enterprise Integrator?

We are committed to ensuring that your enterprise middleware deployment is completely supported from evaluation to production. Our unique approach ensures that all support leverages our open development methodology and is provided by the very same engineers who build the technology. For more details and to take advantage of this unique opportunity, see WSO2 Support.

ESB Profile questions

What makes the ESB fast and high-performant?

The mediation core of the ESB is designed to be completely asynchronous, non-blocking and streaming. It comes with a non-blocking HTTP transport adapter based on Apache HTTP Core-NIO, which is capable of handling a large number of concurrent connections. The ESB also uses Apache AXIOM, a StAX based XML infoset model, to process XML and SOAP. This enables the ESB Profile to stream messages through the mediation engine without having to invoke slow XML processing routines for each and every message.

Can I extend the management console UI to add custom UIs?

Yes, you can extend the management console easily by writing a custom UI component and simply deploying the OSGi bundle. For more information, see Customizing the Management Console in the WSO2 Administration Guide.

Can I use a primary user store to manage and authenticate ESB users?

Yes, you can connect the ESB with any primary user store implementation. The user store could be LDAP based, JDBC based or a custom developed user store. For more information, see Managing Users, Roles and Permissions in the WSO2 Administration Guide.

Business Process Profile questions

Does the Business Process Profile provide a graphical console to view and manage processes and tasks?

Yes, the Business Process Profile comes with a complete web-based graphical management console that can be used to easily deploy, manage, view and execute processes as well as tasks.

What are the forms in which I can expose a business process created via the Business Process Profile?

By default the Business Process Profile only supports exposing business processes as REST API. It is not possible to expose a business process as a SOAP service. However, if necessary you can use the ESB Profile to perform SOAP to REST mapping, and then use SOAP clients to call the SOAP service exposed via the ESB.

What is BPMN Explorer?

BPMN Explorer is the web application that allows you to view and work with BPMN processes. It is a Jaggery-based, lightweight web application that you can customize and deploy in a web server.

Can I create my own web application instead of using the BPMN Explorer?

Yes, you can develop your own web application using the BPMN REST API. Take a look at BPMN Explorer Jaggery Application implementation to understand how you can create your own web application.

Can I use BPMN instead of BPEL via the Business Process profile?

The Business Process Profile supports both BPMN and BPEL.

• For a tutorial that walks you through the steps to create a BPMN process, see Creating a BPMN Process.
• For a tutorial that walks you through the steps to create a BPEL process, see Creating a BPEL Process.

Does BPMN support human tasks?

Yes, BPMN user tasks are similar to the human tasks functionality. Unlike BPEL, BPMN does not require external human task support.

Does BPMN support assigning tasks to users on the basis of equal distribution of the workload?

This is not supported out of the box via BPMN, but you can use a service task to invoke a Java class with the load balancing logic, which will check the statistics of the processes and change the assignee accordingly. You can set the assignee from a process variable inside the task.
If necessary you can do this manually by getting an administrator to assign tasks to users in a manner that equally distributes the workload.

Analytics Profile questions

What are the statistics that I can view using the Analytics Profile?

You can view and analyze statistics related to the processing carried out by the ESB profile as well as the Business Process Profile via analytics dashboards of the Analytics Profile. For more information, see WSO2 Enterprise Integrator Analytics.

Can I generate reports via the Analytics Profile with the statistics and data that I view?

Generating reports is not directly supported via the Analytics Profile. However, if you want to generate reports with statistics and data, you can use the Analytics Profile to persist data to SQL, and then use a third party reporting mechanism to generate reports using the persisted data.