Rule based mediaiton enabled in the Open Source ESB

Now you should already be aware of the new release of the open source ESB, which is the 2.1.0 version of the WSO2 ESB.

It is a much matured release, but it is not just the maturity and stability which brings to you by this release but a few very important new features... Top on my list is the Rule based mediation and this post is about that.

First of all lets look at, what is Rules, Rules Engine and what is the importance of Rules in to the message mediation in SOA?

Rules is a functional construct which is used to match the decision making from the technical aspect to the business aspect of it. Basically you need to provide in a set of name value pairs as facts and then you need to specify a set of rules to the Rules Engine, and the engine will process these facts according to the specified rules. When it comes to SOA, it is vital to have this sort of a configurable processing of the messages according to a set of rules over the messages.

This model better fits into an ESB rather than a service hosting environment, this doesn't mean that WSO2 will not going to make it to Rule based services (or may be Rules as a service) but it has much value at the mediation layer, especially with the power of Complex Event Processing with Rules. WSO2 ESB uses the Drools as the Rule implementation which enables you to add CEP to the ESB very easily because the latest release of Drools has the CEP capabilities as well.

The other main advantage of using the WSO2 ESB over any otehr ESB is the comprehensive set of samples which helps you get off the ground quickly. Same is true for Rules as well, we have 6 samples explaining the different behaviors of the Rule based mediations. If you haven't yet tried the open source ESB, now it is the time to get started with it by downloading it or never look at it :-).