Most EAI and ESB solutions are based on a centralized architecture. While this implies simplicity of configuration and maintenance, it also means increased risk of downing the whole infrastructure, in case the middleware crashes. Such an incident would have a serious, if not catastrophic, impact on the business.
Choosing a middleware clusters reduce this risk but adds great complexity to the infrastructure.
Petals ESB chose the third way, using a P2P-like approach: the container can be installed on several machines, each one hosting its set of services, router and shared registry of services.
- high availability, thus SLA respect, thanks to replication of services on several nodes and intelligent routing;
- inherent load balancing.
[Learn more on architecture models|http://www.petalslink.com/en/technologies/what-is-a-highly-distributed-architecture]
Light & Powerful
Petals ESB is entirely modular, making it a light, loosely-coupled platform, without the requirement to deploy to an existing application server. Numerous components are already available for message exchange (FTP, SOAP, REST, POP...) and services creation (POJO, Quartz, XSLT, Talend...)
Standard & Open Source
Petals ESB is one of the few to be fully compliant with the Java Business Integration specification. It makes full use of standards protocols.
As an open source product, you can freely adapt it to fit your need, be it through a new component or container adaptation, or ask any expert to do it for you, without being bound to Petals Link (although we are probably the finest experts on these matters).
Ease of configuration
Setting up services, orchestrating them, transforming messages, can prove a hassle from middle-sized projects on. [Petals Studio|petalsstudio:] greatly facilitates these steps, by providing numerous service creation wizards, import/export tools, a graphical interface to create services orchestrations.
Ease of administration
One of Petals ESB's most useful add-on is the [Web Console|webconsole:], web-GUI to easily watch and administer the ESB: deployement of new services units and assemblies, components management, fine-grained technical monitoring, testing facilities.
Business-oriented monitoring
While previous items appealed more to developers and system administrators, Petals View is aimed more at non-technical users. Once Petals View has been set up and connected by the former, end-users can further configure fine-grained, detailed business reports on any message exchange going through Petals ESB. With this, they can easily follow their business procedures, identify any problem and use this data to build process efficiency analyses.
Business-oriented management
In contrast with the Web Console, which allows technical deployment and management of services, Petals Master provides a graphical way to manage services from a business point of view. Associate services to roles, users and company to build a structured business-oriented view of all your services, document them with attached documents. All of this allows better business management, processes improvement and optimal reuse of services. Thus ensuring a proper evolution of your infrastructure.
As a extensible platform revolving around an open source Enterprise Service Bus, Petals SOA Suite can cover traditional needs as well as more ambitious projects. Most companies / organisations have three typical needs nowaday:
Application integration: connecting heterogeneous applications to share data or features, automate some processes, in overall lessening the human intervention in data processing.
Mediation platform: exposing data and/or services outside one's infrastructure, to allow employees to work in travelling, providing online services to clients or partners, to gather data from external sources...
Flexible infrastructure: being able to adapt services, processes or modifying software composition (like, replacing a business-oriented solution for a more performant one) without impacting the running infrastructure.
The two first needs are being covered since years, with the help of EAI (Enterprise Applications Integrations) solutions, ancestors of today's Enterprise Service Buses.
The page ESB does not exist.
As for the need for an agile infrastructure, that's where [Services-Oriented Architectures] shine, and that's why SOA market soared up since the last years, while SOA as a concept gained analyst's approval.
However, setting up a services-oriented architecture from an existing infrastructure can be very time&money consuming. This is where Petals SOA Suite play its cards. Thanks to its native conception and configuration / administration / business-oriented tools, Petals SOA Suite allows a pragmatic approach for SOA integration.
Let's get it on!
First step will be to get our latest released products, at our download center : http://download.petalslink.com
Then, dive into action, with the help of our user guides, starting with Petals ESB.
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