Flavors of ESB softwares

Hi.
Suppose we want to employ ESB/JBI in our organization.
In which flavors ESB products (Mule, Synapse or any thing else) come in? WAR, EAR, RAR or a standalone server?
Thanks.

Hi John,

Let me answer your query in the context of ServiceMix and the book in discussion:

ServiceMix is a container for JBI components. At the same time the ServiceMix JBI container by itself is a JBI component. This characteristic enables ServiceMix to be deployed as a standard JBI component into another vendor's ESB container, provided the host ESB container supports JBI components. When we say a ServiceMix container is a JBI component, it means that a host container (like OpenESB from Sun) can make use of almost every ServiceMix component, whether the component is a standard JBI component or a lightweight component (the difference between these two is explained in the text). The promise of this model is that the developer-created components can be reused across JBI containers.

To answer your query:

WAR, EAR, RAR or a standalone server?

ServiceMix supports integration with JOnAS, JBoss, Spring, Tomcat, Geronimo, etc. Moreover, ServiceMix is also available as a .war file which can be used to deploy ServiceMix inside any J2EE application server or Servlet Engine. This will aid the side-by-side deployment I talked about in this link.

To learn more on ESB, JBI, ServiceMix & EIP, refer to the PACKT title "Service Oriented Java Business Integration":
http://www.packtpub.com/service-oriented-java-business-integration/book
http://www.amazon.com/Service-Oriented-Business-Integration-Binildas-Christudas/dp/1847194400