I am pleased to announce the ChainBuilder ESB 2.1 GA release. Even though this one is a point release, I feel that it is as significant as a major release.

• We get all third-party software up to date since we started this product more than 2 years ago. The Eclipse 3.4 upgrade was a major undertaking since there are major changes in EMF, GEF and GMF. The result was awesome. The Eclipse 3.4 Java EE package gets a lot of useful plugins for integration, SOA development 
• We completely revamp the ETL support. When I talked and demoed to our prospects, they were amazed how easy it was to do data integration with our new ETL functionality. I am also very happy to share that we have redone the Linc for Amazon solution with the new ETL features and it went live for two weeks without any glitch.
• The newly added SMAT feature allows us to close the gap with an established EAI product such as Cloverleaf. This is especially useful in a hospital environment.
•   We continue to emphasize on the easy-to-use. We have added context-sensitive online help for all the UI. It is also available here.

Please check out the release notes and give it a try.

I have been working at the Bostech Beijing office the last two weeks.  Everything in Beijing has a festive atmosphere with the Olympics!  China and its people have been working very hard the last several years for this historic event.  On the good day-to-day side, I've noticed the streets are much cleaner and the new Subway Line 10 is awesome!  On the other hand, this month I am a visitor in Beijing too, and the hotel prices are sky high during the games!

This month Bostech "won the gold" in the Chinese financial industry when a pretigious Chinese financial institute purchased ChainBuilder ESB as part of their SOA solution. 

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Jamie asked this question in the user forum: http://chainforge.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1101.  As an enterprise architect or developer, you have been tasked to select an ESB as the core to build out your SOA infrastructure.  You have the choice of several open source ESBs, such as ChainBuilder ESB, Fuse ESB, Mule ESB, JBoss ESB, and WSO2 ESB.

In the open source ESB space, what is unique about ChainBuilder ESB?  What are its strengths over other vendor's products?  Let's look at the key differentiators... (More)

ChainBuilder ESB 1.2 was released this week, with the following improvements from the CB ESB 1.0 release: (More)

One noticeable feature in the CBESB 1.2 Milestone 1 released this week is a completely new HTTP component with improved web services support. Up until the 1.2 release, the HTTP component in ChainBuilder ESB was based on the HTTP component from Apache ServiceMix. .. (More)

I am in San Jose -Sun's headquarter office this week to attend the JSR 312 Expert Group face to face meeting. This is the first time I have been involved in a group meeting to define a new specification. I must admit this is a new and enlighting experience for me. You are in a room to collaborate with a dozen very smart and experienced technologists. JBI is a real special case since it targets three different distinct developers – the container implementer, the component and tooling developer, and the end-user developer. The spec needs to cover the concerns from all those groups. It is a delicate balance. (More)

The day before I went to Java Symposium in Barcelona, Spain to speak on JBI, our development team made available the Release Candidate for ChainBuilder ESB 1.1. This new version adds a custom component project wizard and many Admin Console enhancements to an already robust integration Enterprise Service Bus.  (More)

We wrap up another exciting week at Bostech. First, we welcome the visit of Fred Aabedi and Alex Fung from Sun's Open ESB Components project. We spent a full day to do deep dive on both Open ESB and ChainBuilder ESB. We discussed contributing the components to each other's platform. This is very exciting for both JBI and open source communities. We are very convinced that JBI is a right approach to build an ESB. As you would expect, without a standard, it will be very difficult for two vendors to sit down and talk about contributing technologies to each other.

As I mentioned last week, we have our Wiki alive now. This is a starting point of sharing information with the community. We will keep adding more content to Wiki. I am very excited about it. Hats off to the JSPWiki. It is a great open source Wiki project.

Have a great weekend.

It is a Friday. This has been an exciting week in ChainBuilder ESB development. We have completed the 1.1 Milestone 1 release and will make it available to open source community next week.

We have been focusing this release on healthcare which has been the root industry for many of us working at Bostech. I am particularly impressed with the TCP IP support. Todd did an excellent job creating a handler framework for users to implement TCP IP application-level protocols. This is a big leap forward from legacy ChainBuilder and Cloverleaf's proprietary PDL language which at this point only a handful of people could comfortably use. (More)

What a week… after 8 months of intensive development, we released the ChainBuilder ESB 1.0 this week. Our architects and our development team in China worked diligently to make such huge undertaking possible. As I reviewed a list of features we planed in 1.0, I realized there are several important ones that were missing in the plan such as easy-to-use Web Services support, JDBC component, JDBC lookup in the mapping, the script and POJO component. We decided to push the release back for two weeks to add them into the 1.0 release. I am very proud we have delivered a rich set of functionalities in 1.0 release. (More)

Since I spent so much effort on the beta release, I have not been able to blog lately. It is just past Christmas Holiday. I am sitting on the beach and relax. It is a good time to add a blog entry here to summarize the beta release. I think we achieved a major milestone with this beta release. (More)

The alpha version of ChainBuilder ESB is now out for a little over a week. I am sure some of you have opportunity to try it out. The alpha version gets a nice set of features to allow you to do a decent proof of concept project whether it is an SOA project or EAI project. The Sequencer component is pretty cool. It is simple and straightforward at some time allows you to stack up a series of operation. With support of Sequencer component and Groovy scripting, you can implement some nice business logic for SOA project.  (More)