Talend Open Studio ESB user feedback please (versus jbossesb/mule/servicemix)

Question

I'm doing a quick review of ESB's and so far I've been surprised and impressed with the Talend ESB. I was really expecting Mule, one of the more well recognized open source esb, to be the defacto.

Before I commit after only an academic and basic testing review, does anyone that has much more hands-on experience with Talend (preferably after using another open source ESB) provide any pros/cons?

The areas that impressed me were: *EAI, the number of components/transports ready-to-go for integration. I found some of the other ESB's followed more of a 'you can get that feature by using Camel or another library', but didn't provide easy integration/guidance in setting up those 'externally available' features.

*Security as a single-point service bus. It appears Talend offers good support for managing security of all your exposed SOA services. I didn't quite get a chance to fully try it in a hands-on environment (again, someone with more experience please!), but the idea that the ESB gave you full (manageable-during-runtime) security control was appealing.

*Pretty good contract-first IDE support for creating the Service then used by the ESB. Again, honest feedback please.

*I am a little worried on the deployment front, it kind of sounds like you need multiple servers/services running, and that 'deployment' of an ESB solution (with the repository stuff...?) may cause multi-point deployment. Also, when shifting service locations (Dev/test/production) it wasn't quite as clear in my quick review (particularly as compared to other ESB solutions...if they are all slightly complicated, that's fine).

*Usecases such as contract-first webservice, that may aggregate/combine/remap information from multiple other webservices (maybe binary java rmi, or ejbremote) to fill-in the response.

*Usecases such as monitoring ftp server for file drops, picking up the file, parsing the xml/csv/edi file format to be fed into another service (not necessarily heavy batch processing)

*Usecases such as monitoring RSS feed for new entries that contain XML/CSV/EDI file links, downloading (new) files, processing/feeding to another service.

*CIFS/windows share I didn't look into, but I'll ask here as well from a monitoring file location/pickup.

Question: Someone with Talend ESB experience, please provide comments to the above statements as to real-world accuracy and/or gotchas, and maybe some more real-world feedback. Like I mentioned above, on the surface I was actually blown away by what was in the Talend Open Studio offered for free as open source but usable in a commercial environment without licensing, and to be honest was a little disappointed with JbossESB and Mule when put beside Talend ESB.

thanks for any feedback!

Answer 1

Talend ESB provides a nice clicky dicky IDE with many components. However when it comes to a customized requirement the solution may become awkward and sometimes infeasible. Some ESB components are not mature enough and it happend in our project that Talend equips this and that on the fly.

When your are software developers I recommend make it by hand. With Apache Camel in combination with Apache Karaf you gain 100% control. By the way these frameworks are under the hood of Talend. The learning curve you need to understand Talend is not that smaller than learning these mentioned frameworks.

Cheers Hilde