“FUSE Community Day 2010“ in Frankfurt

On May 25th 2010, I attended the „FUSE Community Day 2010“ in Frankfurt, Germany. That is a free one day conference, where some important open source projects of Apache are presented by Fuse – a company which offers commercial support for versions based on these products.

Which products were presented?

FUSE presented especially the following three products:

–       Camel: A lightweight framework which implements the common Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP).

–       Active MQ: A message queuing software.

–       Service Mix. An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which uses for instance Camel and Active MQ.

My Impressions about this conference

My impressions of this one day conference were very positive:

–       About 50 developers came to listen to committers of these projects. The committers also discussed a lot with the people after the presentations.

–       The products were presented vendor-neutral: No advertisements or reasons why you should use these products instead of some from other vendors. That fact really surprised me!

–       Besides, some employees of external companies presented their experiences with these products in large projects.

–       Although the conference was for free, the location was really great (nice hotel and conference room, very good lunch, coffee, cakes, drinks, and so on).

Conclusion

My conclusion: I really like Camel and Active MQ, both are very interesting products.

–       Camel: Easy to use for routing and transformation (e.g.  to route from MQ to File or from Active MQ to WebSphere MQ).

–       Active MQ: A good alternative to expensive commercial products such as WebSphere MQ. Meanwhile it offers high scalability and availability to work stabile in productive systems.

–       Service Mix: I do not like the idea to use this ESB (the current version 4 now uses OSGI instead of JBI) , so it is not lightweight and not easy to use. I would probably prefer either a lightwight open source ESB such as WSO2 ESB (which is based on Synapse) or Mule ESB or if a lightweight ESB does not make any sense, I would choose a commercial product with a graphical user interface.

The slides are avaiable at http://fusesource.com/fuse/fuse-osc-day051409/.

Probably I will attend the next „FUSE Community Day“ in a reachable area, too. Maybe this blog entry eases the decision wheter you will also attend…

Best regards,

Kai Wähner