Former WSO2 ESB and Apache Synapse ESB Architect Ruwan Linton Joins AdroitLogic

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Ruwan Linton has joined AdroitLogic!

Ruwan was the former architect and product manager of the WSO2 ESB, taking over the position when I left WSO2 in October 2008. We've worked in the past together for over 2 years and contributed over 80% of the Apache Synapse ESB which is also the core of the WSO2 ESB.

Ruwan is a brilliant architect, and a good friend. We both understand each other perfectly well, and thus he will be a great addition to AdroitLogic as its new Director of Engineering!

Here is the full press release: Former WSO2 ESB and Apache Synapse ESB Architect Ruwan Linton Joins AdroitLogic

The ESB Performance Testing Framework & Results of Round 4

I developed the original ESB Performance Test Framework - in June 2007 while actively working on the Apache Synapse and the WSO2 ESBs. Since then, we've run three rounds of testing, comparing both Proprietary and Open Source ESBs - including Mule, Apache ServiceMix, Apache Synapse/WSO2 ESB, a leading proprietary ESB and the proprietary version of an open source ESB.

It was interesting to see other vendors such as Mule and BEA picking up this test framework in addition to WSO2, in publishing results. However, due to different hardware configurations being used, and other advanced tuning or optimizations performed by vendors - the results were left a bit questionable and could not be compared in a fair manner.

This latest round - Round 4 - takes this framework to the Amazon EC2 - and is designed to let end-users run the tests on an EC2 node for less than $2 of computing time! This will allow differences in hardware to not make any difference, and allow the users to see how exactly the tests have been configured, tuned and run.

I hope Mule, ServiceMix, JBoss, OpenESB, Petals, BEA/Oracle, IBM, WSO2 and any other ESB vendors I've missed will make use of this opportunity and publicly share the necessary configurations so that we could all rely on an accurate and fair benchmark - which can be verified independently on demand by any end-user!

Hence - unlike in the past, I will refrain from naming any competitor - unless its vendor or the open source project team requests that it be included and the results publicly shared. Thus it is now left to the users of ESBs - to demand the configurations necessary for them to run these tests from vendors - and themselves decide which one to select after executing the test on Amazon EC2. I hope to make this process even simpler at the next round - with a custom AMI and more automation

The Round 4 results includes the three test cases conducted earlier (i.e. Direct Proxy, Content Based Routing [CBR] Proxy, and XSLT Proxy), and adds a new scenario for WS-Security processing.

http://adroitlogic.org/samples-articles-and-tutorials/15-tutorials/48-esb-performance.html

Ohnoh - Ohloh got it all wrong!

Well its been almost 8 months since I first reported the inability of Ohloh to correctly analyze a codebase of a project.. In-fact, Ohloh knew about this and they stated "This affects a lot of projects, and I desperately want to get this fixed, but it will take some time" [1].. So I checked back in 4 months since there was no progress, and got the attention of Jason - the chief geek at Ohloh. But unfortunately "this problem simply doesn't rank as high as driving & monetizing ohloh adoption" [1].. and there were some "workarounds" which got my attention! However, after many trials by Jason and me, we couldn't get a historical repo created for Synapse, probably because "Apache Svn repo is one single GIANT repo" [1].. but then again.. this is an Apache project! where many open source projects that Ohloh tracks, lives and thrives.

I then questioned the reason for Ohloh to use the "--stop-on-copy" option.. to maybe try to fix the "real" problem, where it "really" occurs.. but no reply from Ohloh.. but some other guy got worked up at this point and said "Just waiting for an answer is enough - The Ohloh boys and girls will work on your issue once they have fixed more important things" [1].., which really got me laughing :)! - You've got to read this yourself here [1].. Then finally, having worked with many open source projects, I thought Ohloh code would/could also be open source, and maybe I could help them fix it!.. but after suggesting that maybe I could help, about a month has now passed, but still no replies from Ohloh.. so I have given up now!

Going back to cool Statsvn, we can see that the Apache Synapse project lived from September 2005 - for over three years! While .. Ohnoh!!.. Ohloh thinks its not even an year old and even shows a yellow triangular warning - suggesting that this could "indicate an immature or volatile project".. I am not exactly sure to which that seems to apply now..

[1] Thread of discussion on Ohloh - https://www.ohloh.net/forums/3491/topics/1326
[2] The correct code statistics for Apache Synapse can be found at [http://people.apache.org/~asankha/synapse/statsvn/]