Reviews for Open-Source ESBs in Action

1. Reasonable introduction to ESBs.

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2009

   Helps to have Enterprise Integration Patterns book when reading.
   Showcases ServiceMix 3.2.1/JBI and Mule. Touches on Spring Integration and JBPM/ODE.
   Have be reading from source download as well as book to make most of things. Book in itself is not complete enough. I prefer to read book with complete examples contained within the pages, so you can comprehend from merely reading book itself.
   Didn't solve anything meaty enough for me to give higher rating.
   I found lack of detail explanation of Listing 4-15 the biggest failing of the book. I also hated the number of times I was told that I could test using the Swing test client. Why not put this in a readme of download?

2. Excellent book on Mule and ServiceMix

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, December 12rd, 2008

   I have been working my way through this book for some days now. It is well-written & concise for everything it covers, yet I don't often find myself mystified by something not explained well enough.
   
   Note that the technologies covered by the book aren't limited to Mule and Servicemix, but include a long list of related technologies. The book uses Spring a good deal and also covers Servicemix EIB, Apache CFX, Camel, Synapse, ActiveMQ, and ODE as well. If you put in the time and effort you should come away with a pretty thorough grounding on how two major open source integration frameworks handle every common problem encountered in modern integration work. Impressive.
   
   The examples mostly work, although setting up the environment was somewhat difficult, not due to any defect in the book as much as there is a huge software stack all of which must be downloaded and installed properly. Tjis has provided an updated environment download which works better than the original script, I suggest you use that in lieu of the original script.
   
   The book forum on the Manning website is worth checking out as well.
   
   The bookj is not perfect but in my view is very well done, so I am giving it a 5.