Frank Kieviet interview on OpenESB at DZone

Dzone hosts an interview to Frank Kieviet, OpenESB Community Manager, about OpenESB, Java CAPS, Glassfish and future directions. It is a good summary of the present status, how difficult has been to get the former SeeBeyond suite as opensource and where it aims to go in the next few months.

From my point of view the OpenESB suite still lacks two major components:

1. A SOA Governance solution. A good registry / repository is an important side component of any ESB, at present Sun should at least establish a commercial partnership with other vendors about that, the strategy here seems a bit confusing and no clear message is available for consulting partners and end customers. My opinion is that OpenESB needs to partner with solutions having a similar dual opensource / commercial license, a closed-source only registry product could lead to difficult sales propositions.
   
2. A ESB management and monitoring console. The ESB Console project is very late, even if it seems a version 1.0 will be released within this year. Any ESB needs robust and easy monitoring and this can't be sold by suggesting users to build their own through JMX or other APIs.

A good SOA Governance suite should allow for easy monitoring and management, repository and versioning of files (for example, versioning WSDL is not enough, the imported XML messages need versioning). Then it should be a single place to apply orthogonal policies for security, auditing, billing, ... The model should be of a policies gateway, working in combination with the ESB as a services proxy.

So far, lacking an integrate offering from Sun, I am evaluating myself some third parties Governance solutions to suggest to my customers, some are quite nice and works well with OpenESB and Java CAPS.