The Bostech Team is pleased to announce that ChainBuilder 2.0 has been released. ChainBuilder ESB 2.0 is a standards-based integration framework that delivers fast and easy SOA implementations for enterprises and software vendors. With a focus on ease of use and rich set of features, Bostech Corporation developed ChainBuilder ESB to connect applications and services to create innovative solutions. ChainBuilder ESB consists of an intuitive development environment of Eclipse graphical interfaces and drag-and-drop functionality to integrate strategic business operations within SOA deployments. Installed across a diverse set of industries, including healthcare and retail, ChainBuilder ESB helps enterprises and software vendors enable niche application adapters, composite applications and enterprise-wide infrastructures. ChainBuilder ESB 2.0 features significant enhancements, including these areas: • New Portal Framework: Provides a plug-in API to extend the ChainBuilder ESB Admin Console. The portal can accept GWT (Google Web Toolkit) web applications that integrate tightly with the existing webapps, or completely independent web applications. • Expanded Script and UPOC Framework: Enhanced to accept user arguments. The UPOC framework now includes the ability to “stack” UPOC functions, so the output message of one becomes the input message to the next. These enhancements greatly improve flexibility and code re-use. • Multiple Component Flow Files Allowed: The Service Assembly project in ChainBuilder ESB supports multiple component flow files to handle dividing and merging complex business flows. Also supports a connector framework for message exchange between endpoints in different component flows or different service assembly. • Usability and Security within the Format and Flow Editors: Incorporated copy/paste, undo, drag and drop across the Eclipse based plugins of the Component Flow Editor, the Format Editor, and the X12 and HL7 Editors, The password fields are now encrypted. • Improved Map Editor Functionality: Now includes XPATH as an addressing mode or as a filter option for an iterate operation. This addition allows fetching a value from the source message using an XPATH expression that can be evaluated to a single value or node. • Improved Map Editor Functionality: Introduced a new Custom Map Operation interface which provides the developer access to the underlying Document Object Model (DOM) structure for both source and target messages. • Upgraded Fault Handling: All components have been upgraded to return JBI fault in event of exception. A custom JBI component “FaultHandler” can be added in component flow for more robust and flexible exception processing. • Improved Admin Console Configuration Options: Significant improvements in configuring endpoint settings, supporting the choice from dropdown lists, password encryption. • More Deployment Platforms supported: Bostech expanded the supported deployment platforms from the original Windows and Linux offerings to multiple Unix platforms including AIX, HP-UX and Solaris. • Runtime Upgrades: The core JBI runtime of Apache Servicemix in ChainBuilder ESB 2.0 has been upgraded to the latest 3.2.2 release. ChainBuilder ESB 2.0 is available immediately worldwide and can be downloaded from the ChainBuilder ESB Community Site at: http://www.chainforge.net.

Congratulation for this new release!

How does this compare to Java CAPS or Portal + Process server offerings from IBM ?

The design philosophy of ChainBuilder ESB is to focus on easy-to-use, lightweight deployment and using open or de facto standards or technologies as much as we can. This is why we adopt Java Business Integration (JBI) as the runtime and Eclipse as the IDE. We decide to stay away from BPEL for the reason of being easy-to-use. Both ChainBuilder ESB and Sun’s Java CAPS are JBI-compliant ESBs. They both provide a Visual IDE environment to configure an integration flow. The difference is that Java CAPS IDE is Netbean and its runtime requires GlassFish J2EE server. ChainBuilder ESB embeds the Apache Servicemix runtime and does not require a J2EE server. ChainBuilder ESB also provides a powerful mapping tool to allow users to natively map from any message format (including XML) to any message format. It does not require that non-XML message to be normalized into XML first. Both products also have different sets of components IBM Process Server is a lot more heavy weight, expensive and complex to use. Typically, IBM products require lots of training and consulting services. ChainBuilder ESB serves different target users than IBM Process Server. Thanks, Eric Lu

Eric, thanks for the update. I agree with you that IBM tooling is indeed very heavyweight, difficult to configure and expensive. We are currently planning to OpenESB but were also looking at ServiceMix. Is Chainbuilder offering coupled with service mix or can we use it on top of another JBI engine (Open ESB)?

The artifacts generated by ChainBuilder ESB IDE are JBI artifacts which do not depend on Servicemix. But they require ChainBuilder ESB’s JBI runtime components to run. We have not certified our runtime components on OpenESB yet. It is in our product roadmap. Regards, Eric Lu