Messaging Battle

Thursday May 16, half of the i8c team gathered for the "Messaging Battle". In our daily life, we typically work with Integration solutions (ESB's) and Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) from the same vendor.

But as integration specialists we also encounter situations where we need to communicate with a MOM product from another vendor. ESB's come with adapters to interconnect with other queuing solutions: JMS adapter, WebSphereMQ adapter etc.

Four teams of 5 people (half of the 40 i8c consultants) went for the challenge to combine 5 ESB's from different vendors with 5 messaging solutions (queuing products).

The following ESB's were used

• SoftwareAG webMethods Integration Server
• Microsoft BizTalk
• Tibco ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks
• IBM Business Process Manager (actually the ESB underneath)
• IBM Integration Bus (was the WebSphere Message Broker)
• IBM Cast Iron
• Oracle Service Bus
• Apache Camel
• SAP Netweaver Process Integration 7.31

in combination with the following messaging solutions:

• Software AG webMethods Broker
• Software AG webMethods Nirvana Messaging
• Tibco Enterprise Message Service
• Microsoft Azure Messaging or Azure Service Bus
• IBM WebSphereMQ
• Oracle WebLogic JMS
• JBoss HornetQ
• Apache ActiveMQ

Note: for JBoss, the JEE application server was used with message driven beans, without any specific integration framework.

Team 1

 

Team 2

Team 3

Team 4

Of course there were the typical issues: network connectivity with a DHCP server sometimes refusing to cooperate, an undersized Virtual Machine for the brand new but rather heavy SAP PI server etc. Also some interesting learning points while configuring JMS e.g. with different JNDI providers.

Team 1 were declared winners: regardless of their technical challenges, they were the quickest to have messages flying around the whole chain of 5 ESB's and 5 queuing products. Interesting to see how connections was established from Apache Camel to Azure Messaging and from Microsoft BizTalk to a JMS server using the JNBridge JMS adapter for BizTalk.

An afternoon of technical challenges but also fun.  Learning about other ESB's while looking over the shoulders of colleagues.

Author: Guy