What is WSO2 ESB? The enterprise integration solution

The current landscape for organizations is characterized by being global, digital and hyperconnected. Companies are on the lookout for service integration solutions to improve competitiveness. One such integration solution is WSO2 ESB.

– Enterprise Service Bus (ESB): What is it and what does it do? –

Nowadays, organizations’ demand for attaining efficient production times, reducing setbacks, improving internal collaboration and generate new customer experiences is on the rise. From a technological standpoint, the proliferation of services which use diverse technologies and protocols within organizations has resulted in the need to implement a service-oriented architecture. But, what happens when we need to connect these services with each other?

It is based on this need that projects are being developed to provide integration tools using the most cutting-edge technology. Among them, we can find projects developed by WSO2, which based on the advantages provided by SOA, develops both cloud and on-premise open-source applications. WSO2 is a company that offers an enterprise platform for total integration solutions: IoT and cloud; and API, application and web service management.

ESB Origins

ESB stands for Enterprise Service Bus. The origin of this software architecture model is directly related to the development of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

– SOA: The perfect architecture to adapt to the needs of a business –

A Service-Oriented Architecture is a step closer to providing abstraction to a company’s software capabilities in relation to reusable services with the purpose of implementing business processes that are more flexible, and ideally, having more agile organizations.

It is important to understand that SOA is not a technology, but instead, an innovative design philosophy based on a methodology that transformed software development styles into modular, distributed and decoupled components.

Due to the considerable rise in the use of web services, service-oriented models are trending development models, which are perfectly feasible thanks to the implementation of SOA.

ESB is therefore a standard architecture model that allows for the implementation of SOA and has the purpose of fostering a business’ growth from a digital standpoint. An Enterprise Service Bus is implemented as a middleware tool to distribute work among the various connected components of an application.

Who needs an Enterprise Service Bus?

An organization needs an ESB to integrate and reuse the services it produces and consumes. In short, its needs are based on the following premises:

Needs to integrate three or more services.
Has to support more than one messaging or media format.
The organization’s applications work with multiple communication protocols.
Has to present its application as services or APIs that are to be integrated to other applications.

Generally, when performing mediation, routing and enrichment services and incorporating security policies to web services or other devices, a middleware tool such as ESB is your ideal solution.

What is WSO2 ESB? The solution for the full integration of services

WSO2 ESB is a fast, lightweight and flexible service bus; it is 100% free software and distributed under the Apache Software 2.0 License – one of the friendliest licenses for businesses in existence nowadays.

WSO2 ESB enables the connection and reuse of IT assets and implemented systems with heterogeneous technologies, including web services, microservices, HTTP protocols, JMS, JDBC and more. Using WSO2 ESB it is possible to implement and execute a great variety of enterprise integration patterns such as service chaining, storage and transmission, filtering, transformation and SOAP routing with binary messages, plain XML and text to support the connection of multiple services as well as developing new services in a very short time.

“WSO2 ESB allows developers to integrate services and applications in an easy, efficient and productive manner.”

WSO2 ESB allows developers to integrate services and applications in an easy, efficient and productive manner. It also offers easy connectivity with cloud applications by means of a wide range of ready-to-use cloud connectors.

This WSO2 product can be deployed in a number of ways: on premise, on any cloud infrastructure, on private clouds and even using container systems.

Why choose WSO2 ESB?

One of the main reasons to choose WSO2 ESB is its light weight and scalability.

You should also keep in mind that it is bundled with a set of complete development and debugging tools in order to streamline enterprise application development, as well as their integration. It is equipped with powerful monitoring and analysis tools for a correct monitoring of communications between the various systems in real-time and in batch mode.

This tool can be also used as a component to develop API Gateways and message Gateways providing a single access point for microservice-based architectures. Moreover, by using this software, validation policies, security, cache, message delivery guarantee, failure tolerance, logging, auditing and more can be implemented.

WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus can be used to implement different roles in system integration architectures. Using WSO2 ESB, an organization will be able to deploy the best SOA management and configuration support and capabilities.