WSO2 Launches WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 4.8, Featuring New Connector Kit and Expanded JSON Support

New release makes it easier to connect to popular Web, cloud and mobile APIs; enhances support for mobile apps; and improves reliability and performance of REST services

Palo Alto, CA – December 11, 2013 – The enterprise service bus (ESB) is playing an expanded role as enterprises capitalize on the cloud, mobile computing, social media, and APIs to extend their processes to customers, partners, and other groups within the organization. WSO2 addresses the demands of these enterprises with the launch of WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 4.8.

The newest release of WSO2’s high-performance mediation platform features a new connector kit that makes it easy to interact with popular third-party sources, such as Salesforce.com and Twitter. WSO2 ESB 4.8 also extends native support for JSON, the lightweight data-interchange format made popular by the growing adoption of mobile applications. Additional capabilities include enhanced message processors and message stores to support enterprise integration patterns; the introduction of three new mediators to enhance usability, and extension of the security vault to facilitate use by developers.

“The enterprise service bus remains the core backbone for integrating enterprise applications and services. Today, that means extending the ESB’s reach across the cloud, mobile and social media channels that organizations are using to create new connections across employees, customers and partners,” said Paul Fremantle, WSO2 co-founder and CTO. “WSO2 ESB 4.8 squarely delivers on this demand with new connectors to support popular enterprise, cloud and social media APIs; increased functionality for mobile apps with extended native JSON support; and new and enhanced mediators to provide enterprises with greater performance, reliability and control.”

Robust Mediation On-premises and in the Cloud

Version 4.8 builds on the proven performance of WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus, which is based and expands on the Apache Synapse ESB to provide a lightweight, highly configurable mediation platform. The 100% open source WSO2 ESB lets administrators and developers conveniently configure message routing, mediation, transformation, logging, task scheduling, failover, load balancing, and more. It also supports all standard enterprise integration patterns and enables transport switching, eventing, rule-based mediation, and priority-based mediation for advanced integration requirements. The WSO2 ESB runtime is designed to stream large data sets and be completely asynchronous and non-blocking.

Architected for the demands of high-volume IT implementations, WSO2 ESB is in production at customer sites handling up to 1 billion transactions per day. At the same time, a deployed WSO2 ESB often fits within just 160 MB of memory space. Featuring full native multi-tenancy, WSO2 ESB can run on servers, in a private cloud, public cloud or hybrid cloud environment—all from the same software.

Connector Kit, Expanded JSON Support in WSO2 ESB 4.8

With the launch of WSO2 ESB 4.8, WSO2 introduces a new connector kit. Connectors included with the kit enable integration with third-party services by providing ready-made, convenient tools for integrating with external APIS. The first connectors available with WSO2 ESB 4.8 are Salesforce.com, Google Spreadsheets, Twilio, Twitter, and JIRA. Additional connectors will be rolled out in the coming months.

WSO2 continues to enhance native JSON support, increasing performance through direct support of the format and making it easier for developers to manipulate the JSON payload. WSO2 ESB 4.8 adds the ability to specify JSON Path expressions on the Property, Filter, Switch, and Log mediators. Additionally, JSON message transformation performance has been greatly enhanced in JSON-to-JSON, JSON-to-XML, and XML-to-JSON scenarios.

Enhanced Message Stores and Processors and Mediators

Version 4.8 of WSO2 ESB also brings enhancements to message processors and message stores, the fundamental building blocks for enterprise integration patterns, such as guaranteed delivery of the message—ensuring a message is never lost, even if a server goes down—or rate control to handle messages at a steady rate. Together the new capabilities provide reliability, control and performance.

Message stores, which hold a message in memory or in a persistent repository, now include a JDBC-based message store in addition to previously introduced JMS-based and database stores. Message stores can now be used with multiple message processors, allowing the message store to act as a queue that load balances the messages among the nodes while maintaining performance by using a separate thread for each message processor.

Message processors, which consume messages persisted in the stores, now support RESTful messages, enabling guaranteed delivery with REST. With WSO2 ESB 4.8, message processors also enable the implementation of HTTP-based asynchronous scenarios, so that the message can be consumed later. Moreover, message processors now retain active/inactive state, so that when an administrator restarts a WSO2 ESB server, only the active processors are started.

In addition, WSO2 ESB 4.8 offers three new mediators. The Call mediator greatly simplifies service orchestration by making it easier to chain REST service calls within a mediation. The Respond and Loopback mediators make it easier to build flows that do not invoke a back-end. The Respond mediator lets developers simply stop the processing on the current message and send it back to the client as a response. Loopback mediator lets a developer take some action on a message, and then return the result without having to invoke a back-end service.

Extended Security Vault

Version 4.8 of WSO2 ESB extends the Security Vault, allowing any string (token key, user name, password, etc.) to be encrypted, saved in the central Security Vault and logically referenced from the ESB configuration. As a result, the developer no longer needs to know the real value, just the key to that value. This approach also makes the elements independent from the environment the application executes (i.e., development, quality assurance, and production), addressing the need to manage the separation of concerns between developers and the operations teams.

WSO2 ESB Builds on WSO2 Carbon Platform

WSO2 ESB is built on the same modular, fully componentized OSGi-compliant code base as the award-winning WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware platform. Like all WSO2 middleware products, it is inherently cloud-enabled and uses proven core framework components that provide a consistent set of enterprise-class management, security, clustering, logging, statistics, tracing, and other capabilities. Additionally, it offers a graphical management console, which is integrated with other WSO2 middleware products, for configuration, management and monitoring. The componentized architecture gives enterprises unprecedented flexibility to customize WSO2 ESB by adding WSO2 Carbon middleware products or the 175-plus components on which they are based.

Availability and Support

WSO2 ESB 4.8 is in production today. It is available as a software download that can run directly on servers or as WSO2 Cloud Virtual Machines running on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), and VMware ESX. It also can operate as part of a private platform as a service (PaaS) by plugging into WSO2 Private PaaS. As a fully open source solution released under the Apache License 2.0, it does not carry any licensing fees.

WSO2 ESB is backed by a world-class technical team in which the experts that helped create the software provide support, leading to direct and immediate access to the people with in-depth knowledge of the middleware. WSO2 service and support options include evaluation support, a special QuickStartSM consulting program, development support, and production support.

About WSO2

WSO2 is the lean enterprise middleware company. It delivers the only complete open source enterprise SOA middleware stack purpose-built as an integrated platform to support today’s heterogeneous enterprise environments—internally and in the cloud. WSO2’s service and support team is led by technical experts who have proven success in deploying enterprise SOAs and contribute to the technology standards that enable them. For more information, visit https://wso2.com or check out the WSO2 community on the WSO2 Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and FriendFeed..