Consider GlassFish ESB v2 for SOA Tooling

January 29, 2009
By Kelvin Meeks

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Why Should You Care?

When you consider the cost of scaling an ESB across the enterprise, with many vendors adopting a per CPU pricing strategy, you can quickly find your costs spiraling into the millions of dollars (if you really want to plan for scalability). With budget constraints being a very real factor in how you plan the infrastructure and tooling to support an Enterprise Architecture/Service Oriented Architecture, the simple CPU cost burden of deploying a commercial vendor's ESB strategy will drive many organizations to adopt a centralized ESB at worst, or a hub-and-spoke ESB model at best. The potentially optimum scalability strategy of implementing the ESB technology stack across all servers hosting services is quite often cost-prohibitive for many organizations to consider (using commercial ESB vendor products).

This is just one reason you might be interested in Open Source tools such as GlassFish ESB.

The vitality of the growth of the OpenESB Project code base is a second factor to consider:

Figure 1: OpenESB Source Code Line Count Growth

Source: http://fisheye5.cenqua.com/browse/open-esb
Reprinted with permission.

I'm not saying GlassFish ESB is the right tool for everyone...and indeed, its capabilities might not be a good fit for your requirements. What I am saying is that it is worth consideration as an option.

Now, it's time to get started with a hands-on examination.

Installation

The GlassFish ESB installation is painless and straightforward. It comes bundled with the GlassFish, the Open ESB jars already integrated into the GlassFish installation, as well as the NetBeans IDE.

There are a number of different installation packages available for different platforms. At the time of this writing, the following were offered:

Windows
Solaris/OpenSolaris SPARC
Solaris/OpenSolaris X86
Linux
Mac OSX X86
Mac OSX PPC

Download GlassFish ESB

The first thing you'll need to do is download the GlassFish ESB release that's appropriate for your environment: https://open-esb.dev.java.net/Downloads.html.

At the time of this writing, Release Candidate 1 (Stable) was available. For this article, I downloaded the Windows version and installed it under Windows Vista.