Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

[admin]

This week we announced our latest design studio from Talend.*As you’ll recall we launched Talend ESB earlier this year, which is based on Apache Camel, CXF, Karaf and ActiveMQ.*This time we are focusing on democratizing the ESB and in doing so, making it easy for Web Services developers to solve application integration challenges in minutes.

As with all our products, our goal is to present a common experience and look-and-feel to our users, thus making is easier for someone to start with one tool and as their needs involve, quickly get up to speed with the next tool in the Talend portfolio.

I experimented with Talend ESB Studio this weekend and I’m very impressed. Impressed that I could quickly get an example up and running in minutes and then see it running on Talend ESB. *I am also very pleased that we only started to build Talend ESB Studio this year and we’ve already got a product ready for download that is really useful.

There are 2 really nice features that I believe are game changers for Apache Camel development.

• The first one is that you can completely develop your application (a Camel “route”) with the Eclipse-based designer and get on-screen statistics as you test the execution of your Camel routes. Quite often when writing integration logic, you can miss the fact that although you application has read, say 1,000 messages, you’ve only processed 990 of them. “Where did the other 10 messages go?” Well, with Talend ESB Studio, you can see the actual route that an individual message took, based on the EIPs and routing logic you’ve designed. This is very neat. Of course for users of other Talend products, it’s something that you have been used to for some time. I’ve attached a screen shot of a very simple example that shows an EIP (Enterprise Integration Pattern) called a “MessageFilter”. The MessageFilter acts on the content of the input files that are read from the “inbox” and sends them to 1 of 3 endpoints. Within Apache Camel, you can specify numerous different types of endpoints or what are called “components” (http, file, ftp, jms, cxf, etc – see http://camel.apache.org/component.html) which are specified using a URI. I’m using “file” for my example here. You can see that that we simply filtering the files based on a simple string: “Paris” or “Dublin” get specific endpoints, otherwise it goes to the “other” endpoint.

• The second thing to highlight is that you can export your “route” as an OSGi bundle and run it directly on top of Talend ESB. You often hear developers explain the virtues of OSGi such as modularity, application life-cycle support, dependency resolution - but when you scratch beneath the surface, you’ll hear some war-stories about how getting the OSGi bundle configuration ‘just right’ can take lots of time, even for relatively competent OSGi developers. Well, again, Talend ESB Studio makes this task pretty simple, by automatically resolving the Route dependencies and creating the bundle for you.

As always we are very interested in your feedback and hearing your suggestions for improving the product. You can download the free Talend ESB Studio from here. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to post a question to the Talend Forum under the Talend ESB section.

Fabrice




More from the Talend blog ...