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