A look back at the last year..

Its been exactly one year since the release of the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus v1.0, in June 2007!

Yesterday we announced the general availability of the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) v1.7, which adds dramatic improvements to performance, as well as support for many new features. The past year has been very exciting for us, and we have been able to impress many happy users on the community, as well as win many production deployments world wide.

Let me highlight just some of the many users of Apache Synapse and the WSO2 ESB during the last year. The ability to easily support Hessian messages in an extremely short period of time, won us a great new client from Germany! They are now actively involved with the projects, and even help us perform load/regression testing as well as testing some of the most complex features such as sticky load balancing in clustered deployments, general clustering high availability and failover and advanced JMX management etc. We have also been chosen over the leading commercial ESB after a one week bakeoff conducted on-site, by one of the largest integrated managed care organizations in the US. In addition, a leading mobile resource management company in the US uses the technology to communicate with thousands of mobile devices, and to integrate existing JMS based services with partners using SOAP Web Services. The underlying Apache Synapse ESB which powers the WSO2 ESB, has been deployed in production by one of the largest auto makers in the world, and will soon be used in production by one of the largest armies in the world as well! Synapse has been able to gather a large community from the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia/China. Its even been embedded already into one of the leading network appliances for SOA, built by a world leader in telecommunications, with others to follow shortly! Its also being used by one of the largest banks operational mostly in Asia, Middle East and Africa with presence in over 70 countries worldwide. Many governments including the Government of Sri Lanka where I live, has standardised on the use of Apache Synapse as "the" ESB. These are all a few of the real users of the software we've built over the last year

Performance of the core engine has always surpassed the leading commercial alternatives, as well as other open source options such as Mule and ServiceMix.(See http://wso2.org/library/1721 and http://wso2.org/library/2259) In fact when we published the results of the performance tests carried out, it surely has created a controversy!

However, we will soon be conducting another round performance testing, so that one could easily compare the latest versions of the WSO2 ESB, Apache Synapse, Mule EE, Mule CE, ServiceMix, JBoss ESB and OpenESB, along with the leading proprietary ESB. We will share all configurations, tools and artifacts used, so that one could simply re-run the tests themselves if needed. Thus lately I have been looking into OpenESB to create some of the scenarios with it, so keep a lookout for my observations!

Since many users from the financial markets has been interested in Apache Synapse and the WSO2 ESB, with the latest releases of these, we have added support the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol and AMQP messaging. This is in addition to the existing support for other transports such as non-blocking http, https, JMS, Mail (pop3, imap, smtp), File systems (ftp, sftp, zip, jar, tar, file, cifs, webdav.. etc). The latest WSO2 ESB v1.7 also adds enhanced support for JMX management, and graceful shutdown of instances, and enhanced support for clustered deployments with support for sticky load balancing, throttling and caching. It also embeds a version of the WSO2 Registry, and provides the ability to connect to an external instance as well.