Q: Why is OpenESB the  “Open Extended Service Bus?”

Answer: Originally, ESB meant Enterprise Service Bus, but today, OpenESB deals with many services beyond the original enterprise scope: things such as IoT, Big Data and Event Streaming - OpenESB is no longer limited to enterprise services, and so OpenESB extended scope is reflected in the new name  “Open Extended Service Bus”.  An OpenESB service can determine at runtime the appropriate service implementation that should be to provide the service, and the rules that determine this can be tailored your requirements. OpenESB is therefore far more advanced and sophisticated than the simple message flow management offered by its competitors.

Q: What is OpenESB’s Background?

Answer: The company SeeBeyond started OpenESB development in the middle of the 00’s. In 2005 Sun Microsystems bought SeeBeyond and added the JavaCaps to its portfolio. Sun dramatically improved the product and made part of the product open source to create the OpenESB project. In 2010, Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and cancelled its support for the project since it was a direct competitor of Oracle products - at the same time, the OpenESB community was created to overcome Oracle’s discontinuation of OpenESB. Since 2010, the OpenESB community has been successful in supporting and improving OpenESB.

Q: What is a difference between Glassfish and Standalone edition?

Answer: The first versions of OpenESB used the application server Glassfish as a container and took advantage of the Glassfish infrastructure (Cluster, JNDI, JDBC…). Nevertheless, OpenESB Glassfish did not match the new architecture, not being well suited to application virtualisation and cloud deployment and it added the requirement of OpenESB users having to understand Glassfish administration.  The community decided to remove the Glassfish server from OpenESB and designed a new OpenESB edition (named Standalone) with the main Glassfish features such as JNDI, directly implemented in the OpenESB core. Today OpenESB Glassfish is no longer supported by the community and users' feedback indicates that the standalone edition is 50 % faster than the Glassfish edition, and provides 5 nines reliability.

Q: How Well Does OpenESB Scale in the Real World?

Answer: OpenESB has been designed to natively provide strong horizontal scalability in every day production, and has proven this ability. One of the biggest OpenESB users, a gaming company in Asia, has provided details on the performance of its platform in production: the platform processes around 100 million business process invocations daily (these being complex business processes and not just HTTP requests) and generates around 10 billion events for analytic purposes.

Q: Why is JBI often associated with OpenESB?

Answer: JBI (Java Business Integration) is a Java specification issued in the mid 00’s. It describes a flexible and intelligent infrastructure for platform integration. OpenESB initial developments were based on this specification. This choice provided a strong, efficient and transparent organisation to OpenESB, and is the reason why OpenESB is often associated with JBI.

Q: Do I have to learn JBI to use OpenESB?

Answer: No, JBI is only used internally  to structure and organise the OpenESB developments. There is no case where the user has to use or understand the JBI concepts, in the same way that one does not have to learn the theories of thermodynamics in order to drive a car.