OSB or OESB

Oracle’s place in the Enterprise Service Bus market has been significantly strengthened through the acquisition of BEA and the incorporation of AquaLogic Service Bus into the Oracle SOA Suite product family alongside the Oracle ESB. But now a days (temporarily) we have a problem which one to choose in new projects.

Oracle Service Bus (formerly AquaLogic Service Bus) is a very mature product and a market-leading standalone Enterprise Service Bus. It was introduced in 2005 and the latest release in February 2008 marked its 2nd major version. After the acquisition of BEA by Oracle the product has been rebranded Oracle Service Bus (OSB). Oracle Service Bus is also entirely driven by standards and applications are based on XML metadata. In addition to being able to work with XML-based data, the engine can propagate payloads in their native formats. This capability is key to the superior performance of the engine in high-volume environments.

Because I’m a native Oracle human being I was used to work with Oracle Enterprise Service Bus from the SOA suite. Very often you have to integrate legacy systems with new applications using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). In case of legacy systems most of the time you have no choice and you have to use ASCII files to interface with legacy systems. With OESB it’s very easy to create WSDL’s based on ASCII files so the file adapter of OESB is very useful (example: standard different possibilities to name generated files).

If you want or even must to work with OSB (”entirely driven by standards”) it’s difficult to work with files. There’s a small file adapter in OSB but there’s almost no functionality.

So when you are going to use ESB’s and you have to integrate with legacy systems with ASCII files do we use OESB or OSB? Maybe we have to create XSD’s and WSDL’s with jDeveloper and use them in OSB or we have to wait until Oracle has fully integrate OSB and OESB. I’m also missing the very useful database adapter etc. within OSB but I agree that’s not an open standard.

Maybe the answer is available in next slide of Oracle:

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Posted by: Jan van Huizen (1 post(s)).