During my past BizTalk engagements, I have had the opportunity to work closely with my clients in developing flexible and maintainable applications.  One of the most common issues that I come across is the misuse of some of the shapes available within the Orchestration Designer.  By misuse, I simply mean to say that many BizTalk developers will drag and drop shapes into an orchestration to implement the business process, but do not take into account the implications of doing so.  More often than not, the result of selecting the wrong shape for the job is not seen until the application is tested or even worse, the production environment.  One of the primary reasons that BizTalk is used is the opportunity to build loosely coupled, flexible and scalable applications.  By choosing the wrong shape, many developers will wind up doing exactly the opposite, thus setting the application down the course of tight coupling and brittle implementation. 

I spent some time recently getting myself oriented with the open source offerings in the Enterprise Service Bus area.  My intent was specifically to focus on the recently released Version 4 of ServiceMix.  However, the latest release is only a milestone release and is incomplete in many respects.  Nonetheless, I attempted to identify and evaluate the value of this release, at least as it is intended by the authors.  This necessarily involved reviewing release 3 and making some assumptions about their inclusion in release 4.

Overview

ServiceMix is intended to be a robust, enterprise service bus which offers tools and frameworks to allow diverse enterprise systems to be integrated to solve business problems or take advantage of business opportunities.  Its value comes in providing an easier way to integrate systems of different architectures, languages, and protocols in a consistent, repeatable, and manageable way.  While there are diffe