Who are the players?

As we have been discussing, the problem of enterprise integration is complex and many vendors have tried to address it in their own propitiatory ESB framework—earlier it used to be dominated by commercial vendors such as Tibco, Vitria, IBM MQSeries, Oracle SOA Suite, Microsoft BizTalk, and so on. Over time, the need for open source frameworks became evident as smaller organizations grew. Their integration needs were limited and were incapable of investing upfront with any of these biggies.

Some of the prominent open source integration frameworks, apart from Spring Integration, are Camel, Service Mix, Mule ESB, Open ESB, and so on. A comprehensive comparison of these frameworks is beyond the scope of this book but a small summary of two other major open source frameworks, has been provided here for the sake of emphasizing Spring Integration simplicity:

  • Mule ESB: It is a standard server, solutions are developed and deployed inside them. Mule is one of the most prominent and stable solutions on the market. The point to be observed here is that, it's a container that holds the application.
  • Service Mix (SM): Apache Service Mix is built over JAVA legacy JBI (Java Business Integration). Service Mix tries to solve almost all aspects of enterprise integration by unifying the features and functionality of ActiveMQ, Camel, CXF, ODE, and Karaf. It provides a complete, enterprise-ready ESB, exclusively powered by OSGi. Since it tries to address a lot of modules, it is pretty bulky compared to Spring Integration.
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