Access Point Framework : - towards a more scalable ESB solution

Abstract: The aim of this project was to investigate the potential issues of existing ESB products and present how the Access Point Framework (an Enterprise Application Integration Framework developed within Aurenav LLC.), mitigates these problems. For this purpose, the framework was compared with two existing ESB solutions- Mule ESB and BizTalk ® ESB Toolkit. In order to be able to present the simplicity of integration with the Access Point Framework, first, it was moved to open source underlying technologies. The two most important ones were the Message Oriented Middleware products –ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ, both of which are interchangeable, depending on the user needs. Additionally, after having the framework fully functional, two simple applications were integrated to exemplify the ease of integration. Currently, the Access Point Framework is synchronous and single threaded, however, the necessary improvements are discussed throughout the paper. The steps described paved the way for carrying out the performance testing that was done on the framework. The project serves mainly as a comparison and evaluation document but also as a base point for moving the APF to an open source solution, while preserving the configurability in order to extend the functionality in later releases.