A Survey on the open source tools for modelling and implementing enterprise application integration solutions

Abstract

Enterprise Application Integration aims to providemethodologies and tools to integrate the many heterogeneous applications of typical companies’ software ecosystems. The reuse of these applications within the ecosystem contributes to reducing software development costs and deployment time. Studies have shown that the cost of integration is usually 5–20 times the cost of developing new functionalities. Many companies rely on Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) to develop their integration solutions. The first generation of ESBs focused on providing many connectors and general-purpose integration languages whose focus is on communications, not on the integration problem being solved. The second generation of ESBs provides domain-specific languages inspired by enterprise integration patterns, which makes it clear that this generation is tailored to focus on the integration problem. In this chapter we provide a survey of Camel, Spring Integration, and Mule, which are the most successful open source second generation ESBs in the market. We report on them within a homogeneous framework that provides a clear overview of the three technologies.