Enterprise service buses hit the road

Fiorano’s Event Process Orchestrator, a NetBeans-based IDE, presented a great palette of prebuilt components that could be modified, saved, and inserted into my flows. From flow controls, database adapters, and MOM connectors to Web-services call-outs, XML transformations, and data-aggregation services, developers gain some good tools to construct intricate processes fairly easily.

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The development interface goes a step further with support for real-time simulation, and the debugger enabled capturing and inspecting message-queue contents on the fly. I viewed the flow of transaction data among components, while simple plug-in adapters offered display services that simplified real-time message inspection and even the capability to chat with other admins and troubleshooters.

Not that the IDE couldn’t be improved. The terribly inefficient drawings quickly became convoluted without manual reorganization, and the inability to specify start and end points in the event process -- allowing data flows, in theory, to start at any point along the chain -- proved disorienting. In the plus column, Fiorano’s XSLT mapper, which graphically depicts its Funclets (functions you insert into translations) for easy manipulation, was one of the easiest I’ve used. And the content-based routing capabilities are finely grained.

In addition to Fiorano’s own orchestration, BPEL development is offered to a lesser degree. BPEL is not completely implemented, resulting in limited transaction management and fault- and event-handling capabilities.

Administration and service-specific management also need improvement. For example, although you can easily view active sessions, the queue manager interface makes it difficult to trace past ones.

Furthermore, although Fiorano’s messaging subsystem is hardy, the bus and related components remain light on features. Not all system components can be exposed as Web services without programming, and supported transports don’t go beyond the basics (HTTP, FTP, e-mail). Fiorano doesn’t support JMX-based management systems or integrate with LDAP for access control. Security features do include programmatic support for JAAS and JSSE (Java Secure Socket Extension), but not good options for federated security, for example. Finally, performance can be sluggish, although the inclusion of FioranoMQ 8 in the next release will likely provide a boost.

On the upside, FioranoESB offers solid messaging underpinnings and a good set of prebuilt services. You can easily extend the system using a variety of programming languages, including Java, C/C++, COM, and C# for .Net client development. Fiorano’s messaging architecture may create a lot of overhead, but the end points are chock-full of resources.

FusionWare Integration Server 3.0
FusionWare’s flagship product features a Java server framework for mediating communications, backed by a Windows-native IDE for designing process workflows and a GUI for server management. The Integration Server’s licensing model offers an interesting way to control deployment costs, and the IDE provides some nice wizards for easing development. Ultimately, however, this suite is suitable only for small, centralized integration projects.

FusionWare’s licensing structure is unique among vendors in our roundup. Licensed by the number of concurrent processing threads, the server ticks down the number of available threads with each inbound request. When a server’s thread count is exhausted, new requests sit in the message queue until a running process completes or is suspended, and a thread becomes available again.

The licensing scheme offers a sign of the solution’s limited scalability. Although you can purchase and install additional worker threads to meet growing demand, I was disappointed to discover that there was no way to pool licenses across multiserver installations.

FusionWare’s tools are also a mixed bag. The Designer IDE is adequate for creating workflows, but can be somewhat cumbersome at times, as it lacks many of the visual queues and graphical tools for streamlining tasks that are commonly available from competing vendors. On the upside, the Business Process Wizard does a good job of jump-starting a project framework, including storing assets and text-based workflow configurations.

FusionWare’s XSLT wizard takes a different approach than most XSLT tools, which typically offer a visual map of inputs to outputs. Instead, XML transforms are done through an interesting two-step process, which involves pre-parsing the input structure to isolate pertinent data items before mapping them out. I personally found the process somewhat convoluted, but it would certainly minimize complexity in handling large document structures.