A Tangled Web

In his article on developer.com, Kevin Meeks makes an interesting observation: “…introducing Open Source tools into any organization can be quite challenging, but an unexpected ally arrived recently which has increased the attractiveness of that option: Budget Reductions”. The article describes his recent evaluation of a number of different Open Source projects for an enterprise architecture technology stack.

Having used GlassFish for the last 18 months, Kevin was “…extremely pleased with its stability as well as the quality of the admin console”, and he decided to take a close look at another product coming out of the GlassFish community: GlassFish ESB. Kevin looked at what’s available in the OpenESB community, the uptake of the community, the cost model, etc. and liked what he saw. He concludes: "There are significant developments underway in the GlassFish project community, and as your SOA/EA efforts may face tighter budget challenges, there is real value to be leveraged by considering the GlassFish Java EE Server and GlassFish ESB project as potential core components within your infrastructure. The excellent integration with NetBeans IDE simply adds to the value proposition."

Kevin's experience is illustrated by a nice tutorial that guides the reader through the entire process, from installation to creating and testing a simple composite application. This is an excellent article for anyone wanting to quickly become familiar with GlassFish ESB.