I am in the process of selecting a open source ESB product for our integration projects. My current top two choices are: WSO2 and Servicemix. I've be trying out WSO2 and I like it so far. It has very nice development and monitor tools with statics tracing. But I heard that the development for Axis2, which WSO2 sits on, is slowing down. And hence a concern over whether it is being phased out slowly.
Does anyone have some insights and/or thoughts on this concern?
Warm regards
WSO2 products are not based on regular releases of Apache products, but on forks of these products. In particular their fork of Apache Axis2 is based on Axis2 1.6.1 and Axiom 1.2.11. The corresponding Apache releases date back to 2011. It therefore doesn't really matter whether Apache Axis2 is growing or not, since you will be stuck with forks of old versions anyway.
Moreover, since WSO2 does modifications to these forks while the corresponding Apache products also continue to evolve (Axis2 is at version 1.7.2 and Axiom at 1.2.19), they will actually diverge from each other. In fact, you will find Java packages under org.apache.axis2 in WSO2 products with code that was added by WSO2 and that has never been part of the Apache Axis2 product.