This documentation is for WSO2 ESB version 4.0.3. View documentation for the latest release.

Enterprise Service Bus Documentation

WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus

The WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a fast, lightweight and user-friendly open source ESB, distributed under the Apache Software License v2.0. WSO2 ESB allows system administrators and developers to conveniently configure message routing, mediation, transformation, logging, task scheduling, fail over routing, load balancing and more. It also supports transport switching, eventing, rule-based mediation and priority-based mediation for advanced integration requirements. The ESB runtime is designed to be completely asynchronous, non-blocking and streaming based on the Apache Synapse mediation engine.

WSO2 ESB is developed on top of the revolutionary WSO2 Carbon platform, an OSGi-based framework that provides seamless modularity to your SOA via componentization. This release also contains many new features and a range of optional components (add-ons) that can be installed to customize the behavior of the ESB. Further, any existing features of the ESB which are not required to your environment can be easily removed using the underlying provisioning framework of Carbon. In brief, WSO2 ESB can be fully customized and tailored to meet your exact SOA needs.

Key Features and Capabilities of the WSO2 ESB

  • Proxy services facilitating synchronous/asynchronous transport, interface (WSDL/Schema/Policy), message format (SOAP 1.1/1.2, POX/REST, Text, Binary), QoS (WS-Addressing/WS-Security/WS-RM) and optimization switching (MTOM/SwA).
  • Non-blocking HTTP/S transports based on Apache HttpCore-NIO for ultra-fast execution.
  • Support for a large number of connections at high concurrency with constant memory usage.
  • Built-in registry/repository facilitating dynamic updating and reloading of resources (e.g. XSLTs, XSD, WSDL, Policies, JS configurations).
  • Easily extendable via custom Java classes (mediator and command), Spring configurations, or BSF scripting languages (Javascript, Ruby, Groovy, etc.)
  • Built-in support for scheduling tasks using the Quartz scheduler.
  • Load-balancing (with or without sticky sessions), fail-over support.
  • Clustered throttling and caching support.
  • Message, Operation and service-level configuration of WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, Caching and Throttling via WS-Policies.
  • Lightweight, XML and Web services centric messaging model
  • Support for industrial standards (Eg:- Hessian binary web service protocol/ FIX protocol and optional Health Level-7 protocol).
  • Enhanced support for the VFS (File/FTP/SFTP) and JMS.
  • Support for mail transports with optional TCP/UDP transports and transport switching.
  • Support for message splitting and aggregation using the EIP and service callouts.
  • Database lookup and store support using DBMediators with reusable database connection pools.
  • WS-Eventing support with event sources and event brokering.
  • Rule-based mediation of the messages using the Drools rule engine.
  • Transactions support via the JMS transport and transaction mediator for database mediators.
  • Internationalized GUI management console with user management for configuration development.
  • Integrated monitoring support with statistics, configurable logging and tracing.
  • JMX monitoring support and JMX management capabilities such as Graceful/Forceful shutdown/restart.

What is new in this Release

The WSO2 ESB version 4.0.3 is the successor of version 4.0.2 and has several new features, enhancements and defect fixes included in it as follows:

New Features:

  • Recipient List Endpoint Type : Recipient endpoint routes cloned copies of a message to each recipient specified in the list.
  • REST API Management : Provides a way to map HTTP requests.
  • Support X-Forwarded-For HTTP extension header.

Enhancements:

  • Renamed HTTP Relay transport to Pass-through HTTP transport.
  • Improved builder mediator for selective message building with explicit builder/formatter pair.
  • Fixed number of blocker issues.

Bug Fixes:

The bug fixes included in this release are both in the base framework as well as the ESB specific components. For more information on the defect fixes, refer to the following pages in WSO2 Oxygen Tank:

Known Issues

For a list of known issues in the WSO2 ESB 4.0.3, please refer to the following links in WSO2 Oxygen Tank:

Community and Support

WSO2 is willing to provide you guidance for any technical issues or questions regarding the ESB product. You can communicate with the WSO2 ESB development team directly using the following mailing lists:

If you want to have a public discussion with other users as well as developers, you can use the WSO2 ESB Forum for developers and users.

WSO2 encourages you to report issues and enhancement requests for the WSO2 ESB using the publicJIRA. You can track their resolutions and comment on the progress.

WSO2 also offers a variety of development and production support programs, ranging from Web-based support during normal business hours, to premium 24x7 phone support. We are committed to ensuring that your enterprise middleware deployment is completely supported from evaluation to production. Our unique approach ensures that support leverages our open development methodology and is provided by the very same engineers who build the products. For additional support information please refer to http://wso2.com/support.

About the Documentation

The purpose of this documentation is to provide you with information for installing, configuring and implementing WSO2 ESB 4.0.3. To find a specific topic in a particular section, click on the topic name in the Table of Contents.

Getting Started

The following topics introduce the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to first-time users and explain its contents and features: