About ESB

Enterprise service bus (ESB) is a software architecture construct, which lives between the (business) applications and enables communication among them. Ideally, the ESB should be able to replace all direct contact with the applications on the bus, so that all communication takes place via the ESB.

ESB provides its fundamental services via an event-driven and standards-based messaging engine (the bus). Thanks to ESB, integration architects can exploit the value of messaging without writing code. Developers typically implement an ESB using technologies found in a category of middleware infrastructure products, usually based on recognized standards.

ESB is a relatively new concept. The term has only been in common use for the last several years. People often associate ESBs and Service Oriented Architecture (SOAs) but they are somewhat orthogonal concerns. However, like SOA, ESB is essentially a collection of enterprise architecture design patterns that is now implemented directly by many enterprise software products.

The WSO2 ESB is a fast, light-weight and versatile Enterprise Service Bus product released under the Apache License v2.0. Using WSO2 ESB you can filter, transform, route and manipulate SOAP, binary, plain XML, and text messages that pass through your business systems by HTTP, HTTPS, JMS, mail, etc.

What is new in this Release

The WSO2 ESB version 4.0.5 is the successor of version 4.0.3 and has several new features, enhancements and defect fixes included in it as follows:

New Features:

Mediation library support
EJB mediator
MSMQ support
Cloud connectors - Twitter, LinkedIn, SFDC (experimental)
XPath 2.0 support (experimental)
SNMP support
API versioning support
Endpoint unification

Enhancements:

Improved endpoint UI
REST API UI support for inline sequences
New deployment synchronizer UI with SVN support
Improved message stores and processors UI
Enhanced JSON support

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 4.0.5, please refer to the following links in WSO2 Oxygen Tank:

Community Resources

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 relevant mailing lists mentioned here: http://wso2.org/mail.

WSO2 encourages you to report issues and enhancement requests for WSO2 ESB using the publicJIRA available at https://wso2.org/jira/browse/ESBJAVA. You can also track their resolutions and comment on the progress.

Questions regarding the ESB can also be raised through http://stackoverflow.com. Ensure that you tag the question with appropriate keywords such as WSO2 and ESB so that our team can easily find your questions and provide answers.

For tutorials, articles, Webinars and similar resources, visit the WSO2 Oxygen Tank and search under the Resources menu.

The Application Programing Interface of Apache Synapse is used underneath WSO2 ESB: http://synapse.apache.org/apidocs/index.html. This API is useful when you write advanced custom mediators.

Support Options

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. WSO2 is committed to ensuring that your enterprise middleware deployment is completely supported from evaluation to production. Our unique approach ensures that support leverages the 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.

Get Involved

WSO2 invites you to contribute by checking out the source from SVN using the following commands. This project uses Subversion to manage its source code. Instructions on Subversion can be found at http://svnbook.red-bean.com.

The WSO2 ESB release 4.5.0 is based on Carbon 4.0.0.

Anonymous Checkout

The complete source including the Carbon platform can be checked out anonymously from SVN with this command:

$ svn checkout http://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/carbon/kernel/branches/4.0.0 wso2carbon

The list of commands that can be run are as follows. If you only want to build the Application Server, you have to always use the option "-Dproduct=esb".


mvn clean install -Dproduct=esb	To create the complete release artifacts of WSO2 ESB including the binary and source distributions.
mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true -Dproduct=esb	To create the complete release artifacts of WSO2 ESB including the binary and source distributions, without running any of the unit tests.
mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true -Dproduct=esb -o	To create the complete release artifacts of WSO2 ESB including the binary and source distributions, without running any of the unit tests, in offline mode. This can be done only if you've already built the source at least once.

Developer Access

Everyone can access the Subversion repository via HTTPS, but Committers must checkout via HTTPS. The Carbon framework related source code can be checked out using the following commands.

$ svn checkout https://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/carbon/kernel/branches/4.0.0 wso2carbon

The Carbon core project is the root project of the OSGi platform on which the Java product stack is built. The Carbon components contain all the components not just the Application Server specific ones. Therefore, you need to build just the set of components required by the Application Server, using the following command:

$ mvn clean install -Dproduct=esb

Execute the following command to commit your changes (SVN will prompt you for password).

$ svn commit --username your-username -m "A message"

Access through a Firewall

If you are behind a corporate firewall which is blocking http access to the Subversion repository, you can try the developer connection:

$ svn checkout https://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/trunk/carbon carbon

Access through a Proxy

The Subversion client can be configured to access through a proxy.

1) Specify the proxy to use in the "servers" configuration file in:

"~/.subversion" directory for Linux/Unix
"%APPDATA%\Subversion" hidden directory for Windows. (Try "echo %APPDATA%")

2) There are comments in the file explaining what to do. If you don't have this file, get the latest Subversion client and run any command. It will create the configuration directory and template files.

Example : Edit the 'servers' file and add something similar to:

[global]
http-proxy-host = your.proxy.name
http-proxy-port = 3128