An Empirical Study of The Behavior of Web Services on Enterprise Service Bus

Abstract

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an Enterprise Application Integration middleware used to integrate heterogeneous and complex applications. It eliminates the single point of failure of the hub and spoke architecture. When web services are used to integrate these applications, either SOAP web services or RESTful web services can be used. Our re- search empirically studied the behavior of these web services on ESB. Apache ServiceMix and Mule ESB were used in the research as the ESBs. Service virtualization, content based routing and message transformation are the core features of an ESB. They are evaluated for web services using standard benchmarks. Based on the conclusions derived from the research by analyzing data, tabulations and graphs, it can be said that the resource consumption of ESBs for web services is vendor speci c and depends on the internal implementation. Also it was found out that RESTful web services have bet- ter mean response time and throughput than SOAP web services. More importantly it became clear that the Mule ESB scales well for RESTful web services than SOAP web services.