ESB Suites In November we began our quest to find the ultimate ESB (enterprise service bus) suite by issuing an invitation to a dozen vendors. Eight took us up on our challenge and sent software to our Green Bay, Wis., business applications lab, home of our fictional widget maker, NWC Inc. Over the ensuing weeks, we posted regular updates from Lori MacVittie in NWC's Real-World Labs. We also made available our vendor invites, test plan and other materials from the testing process. Next week rolled out the individual product evaluations from our ESB vendor participants, including BEA, Cape Clear, Fiorano, IBM, Oracle, Sonic Software, Software AG and TIBCO. Now, see the final results as we reveal our Editor's Choice winner and post our market analysis and Interactive Report Card so you can build your own ESB shortlist.

Oracle has spent several years acquiring technology, and just as long putting the pieces together into a cohesive offering--including Collaxa for BPEL, Oblix for WS-Security and WS-Management, and branded Systinet BSR 6.0 for its registry/repository. Toss in a rules engine and the result is SOA Suite, a nearly seamlessly integrated set of tools designed to enable SOA implementations in the enterprise.

The primary component in SOA Suite is Oracle's BPEL PM 10.1.2. SOA Suite is a J2EE offering that can be deployed in a number of containers, including IBM's WebSphere, BEA Systems' WebLogic, JBoss and OracleAS. By default, the suite installs in an OracleAS container with an embedded OracleLite meta-data repository.

SOA Suite differs from most of the other products we tested in that all of its instances of a service orchestration are technically stateless, with session information stored in the repository. Although OracleLite is the default repository, we could (thankfully) configure SOA Suite to use an enterprise-class RDBMS, such as DB2, SQL Server or, of course, Oracle. Instances of SOA Suite do not communicate, so we couldn't designate backup nodes as we could with Fiorano's product, but because all state information is stored in a shared repository, instances should be able to re-create themselves, regardless of which node they were instantiated on. Failover requires that load balancing be configured at the container level, or that you use an external, hardware load balancer such as those from F5 Networks or Citrix. Failover using BEA AquaLogic is accomplished using WebLogic Server clustering technology, while Cape Clear relies on the clustering capabilities of the J2EE enterprise service platform in which it is deployed, with some routing-based failover available at the ESB layer--provided the container handling the routing isn't the one that fails, of course. We prefer to see failover at the ESB layer, because it knows about services.

Oracle BPEL Console Click to enlarge in another window

Like TIBCO's product, Oracle's allows for profiling individual orchestrations, providing execution times on a per-activity basis. But unlike TIBCO's, Oracle's presentation of the data in SOA Suite's Web-based console was easy to navigate. Unique to SOA Suite is the ability to fully manage in-flight orchestrations and execute multiple versions of the same orchestration. We were particularly pleased with the audit-trail capabilities of Oracle's and BEA's products, though Oracle's audit trail is available for all instances. Still, SOA Suite lacks AquaLogic's granularity of monitoring in this regard, and exposing process-variable data through AquaLogic's monitoring capabilities is far easier than accomplishing the same task with Oracle SOA Suite.

Configuring SOA Suite to communicate with OpenJMS was as expected and is on par with other products in our review. Gaining RDBMS access, as well, was a painless task we accomplished easily. Oracle distributes DataDirect drivers for connecting to most popular RDBMSs, and we were pleased we didn't need to copy any driver files to the system to enable connectivity to NWC Inc.'s Oracle9i database. Given the sheer hell we went through with Sonic Software's SOA Suite to configure simple access to the same database, we greatly appreciated the ease with which this task was accomplished using Oracle's.

We were likewise pleased with Oracle's default in-memory communication between processes of like service types. HTTP-to-HTTP and JMS-to-JMS services in the same container, for example, can communicate without requiring the overhead of setting up the underlying TCP session for an HTTP exchange. This feature was offered by BEA's suite as well--except for SOAP/HTTP services, which always required us to set up the underlying TCP session. Oracle also claims to have an optimized SOAP stack to speed up communication, but we couldn't test performance across all products so we can't confirm this. All communication between services within an SOA Suite orchestration is through SOAP/HTTP or SOAP/JMS, as is the case with the products from BEA and Cape Clear.

SOA Suite's design-time environment is available as a JDeveloper or Eclipse plug-in. By default, it installs JDeveloper and its plug-in. Service orchestration is accomplished using BPEL, and we preferred Oracle's BPEL editor over that from Cape Clear, the only other vendor to offer a BPEL-only modeling environment. Oracle uses the same sort of environment for building transformations that Fiorano employs, but Oracle's is a bit easier to use; we found it less developer-oriented than Fiorano's mapper, which is somewhat surprising as many of Oracle's tools are highly developer-oriented. Although both are graphical and use a drag-and-drop mechanism for building up expressions, Oracle presents the various functions, like concat, without exposing you to developer-oriented parameterization requirements.

SOA Suite's default XSLT engine is Xalan, with Xerces as its default XML parser, but both use a pluggable model and can be replaced with another parser and engine if so desired. We modeled our scenario for NWC Inc. in short order and quickly deployed through the JDeveloper plug-in, though Apache Ant scripts are also available, and likely preferable in an enterprise setting. The only nit here is that Ant scripts must be created by hand, so your mileage may vary.

We were pleased with the ability to route within an orchestration based on payload as well as headers and process variables. Like the other products in our review, SOA Suite's routing and decisions are based on XPath expressions. While creating the XPath required to route our process we found Oracle's XPath builder a boon; it didn't require the cutting-and-pasting demanded by the products from Sonic Software and Software AG.

Oracle's pricing scheme--cut-and-dried compared with several other products--is based solely on number of licensed CPUs. Existing Oracle Application Server customers will shell out $20,000 per CPU, while new customers can compute the cost at $50,000 per CPU.

Oracle SOA Suite, $100,000 as tested. Oracle, (800) ORACLE1, (650) 506-7000. www.oracle.com/soa