I am strongly inclined towards WSO2 and completely close everything that was in my first direction during Q1.
On site / as is:
- Oracle Service Bus 11g
- Oracle SOA Suite 10g and 11g (used as a service bus)
Roadmap Candidates for Addition:
- WSO2 ESB (Apache Synapse +)
- Apache ServiceMix
Strong opponent:
- ESB Fuse (Apache ServiceMix +)
- UltraESB
Out of competition:
- Mule esb
- Tibco, WebMethods, Everything Else, Big Money
Defining ESB as a transformation, routing and mediation of stateless people Ive got the following systems in the game or in research (they actively promoted OAGiS, and your question is relevant for me). In no case my experience and impressions of the items from the above lists:
1) Oracle SOA Suite 10g and 11g (terribly used as an ESB with "poor people") My heartache was Oracle SOA Suite. This is a product that I really like, but my organization cannot - will not - buy RAC. And SOA Suite does not fly without RAC. In addition, the SOA Suite is archived on "do everything", including non-stateful adapters, which I would prefer to use Camel for (for example, JMS-, File-, DB-adapters, etc.). Thus, it is a mixed, wealthy and non-conflict, instant and long-term, persistent and ephemeral, orchestral and choreographic disorder. This is useful for making piles of incorrect long-term solutions faster.
2) OpenESB My first "SOA" love ... cut my teeth at retail. Then Oracle bought Sun. And then in the end.
3) Oracle Service Bus 11g (BEA AquaLogic Service Bus) I am actively looking to replace Oracle products; and although I like the OSB product - in fact - it is very long in dental safety standards and it feels almost without support now that Oracle is figuring out how to get it from BEA (Eclipse) and move it to Oracle Infrastructure (read: JDeveloper ) I grew up to appreciate JDeveloper by the way, but that's a different topic. WS- * standards are aging. There is no built-in pub / sub mechanism; but JMS is well supported. However, if I wanted to manage JMS-as-MOM, I could just do it and use Camel most successfully. All that is said, OSB is a very good product, and we have room for several ESBs. We run several canonical buses: OAGiS, NIEM, etc. I have one cluster that works almost forever.
4) ESB Fuse Looked at it, and one of my biggest integration partners uses it. Using a set of basic enterprise integration patterns to verify, and for some reason, it was not trivial to transition using Fuse. I have several developers who did not come from the Maven mentality, and the IDE took the wheels off the wagons. This, of course, is for all ESBs managed by the ServiceMix console, so the differentiator comes from the IDE and the console. I also find it a “nice feature,” and our developers and support staff use consoles to troubleshoot customer issues. Thus, Fuse did not shake me, but he did not notice me either.
5) Mule ESB I remember Mule from the “good days” (really, before I started using Apache Camel), where I used it to move information from anywhere to anywhere. Very point-to-point, very old school, but the gold standard of efficiency. But it was a Mule without an "ESB". Mule EBS is lightweight (they say so), and I was told that Major League Baseball is using it, so I have to be a nut so as not to buy it immediately. The ability to use LDAP is a corporate feature. I can almost even accept SAML2 or OpenID or OAuth as enterprise features, but LDAP? I know trivial, but he cabled what I consider to be the lack of a "heart of developers." I believe that the community edition will be hobbled.
6) Apache ServiceMix If I use servicemix, I would like to find the one that added value for consoles and reports. But if I decide that this is not so important, I could also use ServiceMix if I intend to create an extremely optimized "programmer". They were pretty good at Ant, Maven and Gradle. You might ask if you were going to jump on hoops, why not jump with a Fuse ESB hoop? There is no good answer for this, except that I expect Fuse to have removed the hoops already.
7) WSO2 ESB Weve used the G-Reg product a bit, and my experience with it was good. Their safety standards are latest and very good; the interfaces are good and decent enough to give the associate developer troubleshooting help; since @ivo mentioned above, WSO2 employees make extensive use of stackoverflow. We used our Stratos-live-product in the “cloud”, but we could never completely get there (completely our side of the security equation and that’s all). I have a soft rule that any open source software should be locally created by a developer with reasonable skills. It never went smoothly using WSO2 software. So this is a risk. But if you are happy to run around binary files, I suppose you can succeed with WSO2.
As stated in @ user9591, WSO2 is used by ebay, and this is either a thing for you or not. I think this greatly influenced the “sale” here.
8) Tibco, WebMethods, and any other non-open source systems. This is added for completeness, although I did not use Tibco after a few years. Not open-source, the way it is.