Even though NetKernel is shrouded with new edge terms like 'Transreptor' and 'Fragmentor', it is quite a practical piece of software. Listen to Jon's 'Innovator' podcast with Pete at 1060 (yeah Tony, your an Innovator too) for a audible view into the NetKernel architecture.
Correlating my recent experiences with Progress Software, the company behind Sonic MQ, and the current market trend of their stock, I can only assume big trouble ahead. A shame as their recent acquisition of Actional filled a large hole in their product offering. I would like to downgrade their status to 'replace' pending identification of a more suitable product.
One value, for me, of an ESB framework is to improve the reliability and robustness of a given set of integrated applications. If a message/event producer can communicate with one or more consumers in an asynchronous way, it should. It really makes things simpler. But one thing to avoid in your routing configurations is injecting synchronous calls into an overall asynchronous process.
I've put together a simple NetKernel module that tends to greatly simplify service and application development. mod-e4x provides helper functions allowing for rapid construction of services using the ECMAScript for XML syntax provided in the Rhino JavaScript interpreter. With mod-e4x, JavaScript becomes a viable alternative to the NetKernel DPML language.
If you are observant, you might have noticed that the latest ECMA Script for XML (aka JavaScript) specification defines, and the latest Rhino release includes, support for literal XML manipulation. If you are inquisitive, you would have discovered that the latest NetKernel release supports E4X on the server-side.
1060 just released version 2.0.1 of NetKernel. This is notable because of their new support for JMS.
Just returned from what I thought was intended to be a discussion over patterns and best practices within an ESB deployment, likely sourced with examples from this new book, since the meeting was hosted by its author. Sadly it proved to be ESB "as" a best practice, where they handed out copies of the book, leaving the interesting discussion as homework.
