Hi, ServiceMix EAI. The name should be probably changed but the idea having an Enterprise Integration Server is to combine the strength of the ServiceMix ESB server and Routing Engine with Tomcat to offer a platform where J2EE applications can also be deployed.
Why : Many clients are still designing and developing their projects as J2EE applications which are deployed as WAR or EAR in an Application Server. People in charge of the infrastructure have skills and competences to manage such J2EE applications. When they have to manage a new kind of server like ServiceMix, they are more reluctant as they have less skills and return of experience. But if we can propose a packaged version of Tomcat where ServiceMix is already deployed, they will accept. We can also say the same thing for the development team because the clients have invest since more than a decade in Java/Web developers + Spring recently. The other advantage that I see also concerning this product is that we can propose to the clients an environment where there applications can be easily load-balanced, services could be deployed as bundles and accessed from J2EE application using OSGI service (like IBM WebSphere does - see Aries project for that and WAB). In fact, we can propose an Open Source SOA solution leveraging of the stregnth of Application Server World, OSGI modularity, Messaging Bus, Routing, ... Combining with REST/WebService, ... who can inter-operate with any other existing system. Loadbalancing is a key success factor in the architecture when we have to process thousands of requests quickly and when we have to distribute the work load between different servers (= cloud computing). What do you think about that ? Charles Moulliard Senior Enterprise Architect (J2EE, .NET, SOA) Apache Camel Committer ******************************************************************* - Blog : http://cmoulliard.blogspot.com - Twitter : http://twitter.com/cmoulliard - Linkedlin : http://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesmoulliard
