Why WSO2 ESB/WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 6.x ?

4 min readAug 4, 2017

Brown-field enterprises require to integrate the existing software application, services, systems and data, to form new software solutions to realize business functionalities.

The task of plumbing these applications, services, systems and data is known as Enterprise Integration.

Although Enterprise Integration is not a new thing, with the increasing adoption of Cloud, Mobile, APIs, IoT, along with the convergence of Data and Application integration technologies, Enterprise Integration is becoming a renewed hot topic in the Enterprise Architecture landscape.

Centralized Integration Middleware — SOA and ESB

Almost all the integration middleware solutions out there are based on the concept of using a central integration bus(a.k.a Enterprise Service Bus- ESB) that can connect anything with anything. The central integration bus knows how to communicate with these heterogeneous systems/service and it acts as the communication channel between those systems/service.

The central integration bus contains the routing logic, implementation of various EIPs, connectors to various applications(on-premise and cloud) and systems, and even the business logic of some interactions. Obviously this has made the ESB/integration bus the heart of the software solution of any brownfield enterprise, in which all the enterprise integration scenarios that are related to the business are built upon.

While Microservices Architecture is proposing an alternative approach(offload the integration workload to composite microservices), there are quite a lot of enterprises who still rely on centralized integration middleware. That’s why all these centralized integration middleware play a key role in the current enterprise architecture.

(However, if you are a Microservices fanatic :) and wondering about the how do we do integration in microservices world, I would recommend you to read my microservices article and refer my slides from a recent Bay area meetup)

Why WSO2 ESB/WSO2 EI?

In the ESB vendor space, most of the vendors have rebranded the monolithic and heavyweight enterprise integration solutions as an ESB. But WSO2 ESB is designed and developed from the ground up as the highest performance, lowest footprint, and most interoperable integration middleware. While WSO2 ESB has to improve its graphical tooling support for designing message flows and graphical data mapping, it offers a broad
range of integration capabilities and high-performance message routing support by using an enhanced and optimized message mediation engine, which was inspired by Apache Synapse.

To understand the key differentiators of WSO2 ESB in detail please refer to Samisa’s article on ‘What is WSO2 ESB’?

What’s new in WSO2 ESB/WSO2 EI 6.x

You can also find a comprehensive overview on the new features of current WSO2 ESB/WSO2 EI 6.x release in the following presentation.

Learning WSO2 ESB/WSO2 EI 6.x?

Given the popularity of WSO2 ESB and being a true open source ESB, you will found quite a lot of resources on the web for learning WSO2 ESB. Also WSO2 ESB documentation gives you a comprehensive resource for learning all the concepts and features of WSO2 ESB.

However, if you want to get started with WSO2 ESB quickly and master all WSO2 ESB concepts based on use cases, I would also recommend to take a look at my book on WSO2 ESB, Beginning WSO2 ESB.

Why ‘Beginning WSO ESB’?

Inspired from real world Enterprise use cases:The book ‘Beginning WSO2 ESB’ provides a comprehensive coverage of the fundamentals of the latest WSO2 ESB/WSO2 EI and its capabilities, through real-world enterprise integration use cases. Hence this book is well suited for both the readers who are getting started with WSO2 ESB as well as who are already familiar with WSO2 ESB.
How to leverage the latest and most appropriate features: WSO2 ESB has drastically evolved over the last several years and now it’s in the 5th generation. There’s been a lot of new features added while some of the existing features got deprecated. Therefore, there is an increasing demand to have a central place to understand the new features along with the best practices of using existing features. This book is fully up-to-date with the latest WSO2 ESB 5.0 version. Hence you will learn fully state-of-the-art capabilities of WSO2 ESB and the recommended and proven best practices.
Use case-oriented learning experience: One of the easiest ways to understand any given concept is to understand a related example and then dive deep into the theoretical aspects. We extensively practice that approach throughout the entire book. Almost all the concepts are explained through real world use cases and you can try out most of the sample use cases while you read the book. And most of these use cases are inspired from the real world applications of WSO2 ESB.
Best practices and recommended patterns: Almost all the examples in the book illustrate the most suitable constructs, that you should select to build a given integration scenario and how to design them in the most optimum way.
Over the years, there have been many enhancements added to the WSO2 ESB and users are really keen to know which is the best approach to building a given integration scenario. Since the book is based on the use case oriented model, the readers can easily understand and directly map and extend the use cases given in the book to the real integration scenario that he/she wants to build.
Ideal for WSO2 ESB trainings and certifications: In my opinion this book is well suited as a textbook for “WSO2 CERTIFIED ESB 5.0 DEVELOPER” certification too.