I have been looking for a comparison between newly released servicebus for windows server, NServicebus and Mule ESB. Requirement is to develop .NET based real-time data integration solution using publisher/subscriber communication pattern.
Idea is to transfer protobuf serialised data messsages over the servicebus.But, it would be great if any of these support file transfers too as we have varied volumes and various kinds of data sources.
I am not sure which one would be a better option to go with.
Really, Azure Service Bus isn't a direct competitor to NServiceBus and Mule ESB. It is closer to a message broker (like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ) than to an integration platform. It does have a couple of features beyond simple messaging such as web service proxy and some nice mobile push notification support.
Mule ESB is an integration platform, which means you create integration applications by using Mule configuration language and extending Mule programming components using the java platform. You deploy your integration application to a standalone Mule server or to CloudHub (Mulesoft's cloud environment). They also offer a pretty big library of connectors, which simplify integration with various other technologies and SaaS.
I have little experience with NServiceBus, but the documentation shows some of the same features as Mule ESB.
Since you can download both NServiceBus and MuleESB for free to try them, I'd suggest giving them both a whirl to see how they apply to your particular integration problem.
.NET service bus is designed to communicate with Azure and enable devices to do RCP-style calls. It does support pub/sub but the maximum message size is only 64 KB.
NServiceBus is probably the most capable choice in terms of interop. It supports one-way, full-duplex and pub/sub messaging. The maximum message size is 4 MB when using MSMQ for transport, but its data bus can be used to transfer large files. It also has a unique concept of sagas, which are long running processes with a shared state. I have not used the latest tools for it, but traditionally the tooling and integration options were not up to par compared to Java based solutions. Also, the licensing model is complex, and seems to be a subject to change with every release.
There is a Mass Transit free .NET service bus which has most of the NServiceBus features, but is a bit more difficult to use.
[edit] Mule ESB has a free community edition and a commercial version. It is a very mature Java based service bus. It has a lot of tooling and integration options with various products. But I do not think it has sagas. But it does have file transport support.
Related
We own a product written in .NET and that uses MS SQL Server. We need to write a new Integration layer that allows integration with a number of third party applications such as Jira, ServiceNow etc. Our endeavor is to use a Microservice based architecture for this integration later and not use an iPaaS or Centralized ESB. Questions are:
Can I embed Mule into a .NET Microservice?
If no, can I embed Mule into a Java Spring Boot application?
In either of the cases above, am I forced to use any other platform/ software from Mulesoft (such as the Mulesoft's Management Plane)?
Does Microservce based embedded Mule provide capabilities for performance/ health monitoring etc.?
Does Mule support writing any custom code in .NET?
Please find the answers below:
Can I embed Mule into a .NET Microservice?
No. Mule 4 is a Java application and currently is not meant to be embedded.
If no, can I embed Mule into a Java Spring Boot application?
No. Mule 4 is not distributed as an embedded Java library.
In either of the cases above, am I forced to use any other platform/ software from Mulesoft (such as the Mulesoft's Management Plane)?
No. You can run Mule as a standalone service or application without using MuleSoft's Control Plane. Be aware that you will lose all management features from the platform.
Does Microservce based embedded Mule provide capabilities for performance/ health monitoring etc.?
Please define to what you refer as "Microservice based embedded Mule". If you mean in the scenarios mentioned in questions 1) or 2) then the answer is no, because those are not valid deployment options for Mule 4.
Does Mule support writing any custom code in .NET?
Yes. There is a .Net Connector to execute .Net code from a Mule application. Look for the last release in the release notes.
My only experience with SOA comes from working with NServiceBus. It's really well designed and has some nifty features that I really like:
Processing of messages is transactional (and taken care of for you), so it's "once and only once" (as opposed to "at least once")
Built-in saga support
Automatic retry support
Pub/sub support (but I assume all service/message busses support this)
All that stuff leaves me to concentrate exclusively on the app's logic, but I've only used it in .NET, and Windows is almost certainly a non-starter for the project I'm working on. So my question is...
What service bus technologies out there exist in the *nix ecosystem (including experiences running NSB on Mono) and how do they measure up to NServiceBus running on Windows?
Bonus: In addition to the features above, what languages can send/receive/process messages from the bus? Having the flexibility to write one service in language A and another in language B would be very advantageous for this project.
SonicESB / MQ
I can speak from experience with SonicESB on Linux. It's basically SonicMQ - a JMS compliant MOM - with a process mediation layer on top; that's the service bus.
Pros
Itinerary-based routing; messages contain their own workflow for what services to visit
Intra-container messaging; increases performance by routing messages within the ESB container, avoiding the broker entirely.
Web service endpoints; ESB service may be invoked over HTTP endpoints, bridging the gap between non-Java/JMS clients and the bus.
Good development tools in eclipse for developing and debugging esb services and processes in Java.
Administration tools aren't bad either.
Cons
Transactions don't span service boundaries (may have changed since version 7.5)
No message retry mechanism; we rolled our own using a utility service and message parameter manipulation (may have changed in 7.5)
Pricey; licensed by core, so expect to pay for it.
Client Support
In terms of what technologies can send and receive to/from SonicESB, anything Java JMS, that's for sure. Sonic also offers a library in .net/C#/VB for Windows technology, so you can send and receive messages from the bus. This was a huge plus for us since our development teams use RIA's built in C#.
You may want to check out MuleESB, an open source service bus.
Hope it helps,
It has been quite a while since I've seriously used NServiceBus (in fact, back then, it wasn't even called that - it was just replacement library Udi wrote, to an awful comm library we had to use on a joint project :) ) so I don't know about all NServiceBus features.
I would say, based on what I do know, that Apache Kafka (originally developed by LinkedIn) would be a good starting point. It has relatively strong ordering guarantees, supports publish/subscribe to pools of consumers and is supportive of workflow behaviours e.g. Samza which provides a streaming framework on top of it
Also regarding the client interfaces. You can find the current list here
i'm about to decide on technology choices for an agent based application used in the transportaion systems domain.
basically there will be a central system hosting the backend, and multiple agents located across town (installed on desktops) that communicate with devices/kiosks collecting data and then transmitting them back to the central server. the central server could also be hosted on the cloud.
following are important
securing the data and communications between the device and the agent
and the agent and central server.
agents should be easily installable with little or no configuration.
near 100% uptime and availability
Does WCF fit the bill here?
if so what binding types should i go for? netTCP or wsHttp with SSL/HTTPS?
WCF is definitely a fit choice for this kind of scenario. For your bindings, the actual question is what technology you are going to use. Do you want to make the agents run in a non .NET environment like Java, then you should chose for wsHttpBinding. This binding communicates through SOAP and is very interoperable.
If you chose to use .NET agents, you might as well use netTcpBinding because they use the same WCF frameworks. It also supports binary encoding. If you really need to make a choice, take a look at the MSDN Documentation.
For your agents you could use a simple console application that runs in the background as a Windows service. WIX can help you with that (install an application as windows service), but thats all I know. WIX can also help you with basic installing and configure everything for you but it has a high learning curve so you might need to invest time in it.
Is it possible to implement a RabbitMQ RPC between Java (acting as a client) and a .NET application (server/worker) using the RabbitMQ .NET library?
It seems like it should be possible, as RabbitMQ broker handles the queues and the socket connections are established between party and the RabbitMQ broker.
Are there any practical considerations in doing so?
The short answer is yes. In fact, my company uses RabbitMQ for that very reason - it offers a platform-neutral (as close as possible anyway) way to communicate between different applications. So in theory, I could have Java applications running on Linux and .NET applications running on Windows, and everything works together just fine.
You will need to come up with a common serialization format for your messages; I recommend using JSON as there are JSON libraries in every major programming language.
If you have any trouble with the RabbitMQ .NET library, feel free to post more questions :-)
I am starting to plan a new platform which needs to integrate various services from various externals platforms. Essentially I'm tying together a bunch of internal, homegrown services and several outside services we license from 3rd parties.
Generally speaking the external services are all web services but they are a mishmash of REST, SOAP and XML-RPC.
Some of our internal services have REST API's but there are many things that aren't so easy: XMPP, Hessian, custom socket protocols, Java RPC, uWSGI, and the list goes on.
From my research it seems like an ESB like Apache ServiceMix might be a good fit for my needs. However it looks REALLY complex. I'm not launching rockets but I do need transactional messaging (mostly for eCommerce and entitlement stuff). I feel like the message queue ServiceMix uses under the hood (ActiveMQ) might be enough on its own.
Can anyone explain what ServiceMix provides above and beyond ActiveMQ? I know there is a lot but it is hard for an ESB n00b like me to really grasp the tangible difference when I'm waste-deep in buzzwords.
Thanks!
ServiceMix is an OSGi based container that allows you to deploy and run applications in a controlled runtime environment (like a J2EE container but less heavy weight and without programming to e.g. J2EE contracts).
Thanks to OSGi you can partition your applications into parts and update/evolve these parts independently from each other. You can upgrade parts of your application without having to take down the entire application. There is far better life cycle management in OSGi then you get with standalone Java processes.
If you think of creating an application that will evolve over time, then OSGi is something you should consider. And ServiceMix provides you a runtime OSGi container to deploy your applications to. I highly recommend the book "OSGi in Action" from Manning.
For tying together different external services that might even use different transport protocols I recommend Apache Camel, which btw also deploys nicely into ServiceMix.
Btw, existing applications can be deployed into an OSGi container with fairly little effort (without requiring code changes).
Torsten Mielke
FuseSource
Web: www.fusesource.com
Blog: http://tmielke.blogspot.com