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In recent years, there have been several technologies attempting to solve these problems such as Enterprise Applicaton Integration (EAI), Business-to-Business (B2B), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Web Services. These solutions addressed some of the integration problems, but were proprietary, expensive, and time-consuming to implement. These solutions range from expensive vendor solutions (high cost, vendor lock-in) to home-grown custom solutions (high maintenance, high cost). The overwhelming disadvantages of these solutions are high cost and low flexibility due to non-standard implementations.

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A standards-based ESB solves the integration problem without the drawbacks of the other solutions. The purpose of an ESB is to facilitate application and process integration by providing distributed processing, intelligent routing, security, and dynamic data transformation. In an ESB these services are infrastructure services so each application does not have to implement these requirements independently and in a proprietary manner.

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An ESB also supports requirements such as security, orchestration, and transactionality. These exist in "hard-wired" integration methods, but are not available automatically in a service-oriented architecture. One of the key requirements for the ESB is to give loosely coupled, service-based integration methods a level of enterprise-class reliability and security.

A newer requirement for ESBs is the ability to allow not only loosely-coupled requests found in a service oriented architecture, but also to provide the infrastructure for an Event Driven Architecture (EDA). SOA and EDA provide complementary functionality. In EDA an event triggers a message to be sent to other applications that are decoupled from the application that triggered the event. This is an asynchronous operation as the recipient applications may receive or pick-up their messages at a later time, whereas the SOA messaging model is typically synchronous in nature.

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While decoupled (EDA) operation (as described in the previous two paragraphs) is more appropriate for the scalability and reliabilty required for high transaction production environments, synchronous request/response communication found in SOA implementations, is also supported. Thus, ServiceMix effectively combines SOA and EDA for the development and deployment of composite enterprise applications.

#top2. Introduction

Background to ServiceMix

Background

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We rapidly came to the conclusion, that as there was no single product that would adequately meet our needs, we would have to just go
a head and build one!

#top2. Introduction

Features Overview

ServiceMix is lightweight and easily embeddable, has integrated Spring support and can be run at the edge of the network (inside a client or server), as a standalone ESB provider or as a service within another ESB. You can use ServiceMix in Java SE or a Java EE application server.

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ServiceMix is completely integrated into Apache Geronimo, which allows you to deploy JBI components and services directly into Geronimo. ServiceMix is being JBI certified as part of the Geronimo project.

Other J2EE application servers ServiceMix has been integrated with include JBoss, JOnAS with more to follow.

#top2. Introduction

Books, Articles and other readings

Just have a look at Books and at Articles; they list several works. In case you are aware of other good resources, please drop a notice (see Contributing).

#top2. Introduction

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