Beyond the inherent improvments of an ESB over traditional EAI solutions, Petals ESB uses a best-of-breed approach and open source development model to ensure you have all the essential features; as well as access to the latest generation of ESB technologies sooner, not later. Together with other Petals software, it provides a company everything necessary to build your project, from a traditional integration platform to a service oriented architecture.

h3. Natively Distributed Architecture

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Most EAI and ESB solutions are based on a centralized architecture. While this implies simplicity of configuration and maintenance, it also means increased risk of downing the whole infrastructure, in case the middleware crashes. Such an incident would have a serious, if not catastrophic, impact on the business.
Choosing a middleware clusters reduce this risk but adds great complexity to the infrastructure.
Petals ESB chose the third way, using a P2P-like approach: the container can be installed on several machines, each one hosting its set of services, router and shared registry of services.
- high availability, thus SLA respect, thanks to replication of services on several nodes and intelligent routing;
- inherent load balancing.
[Learn more on architecture models|http://www.petalslink.com/en/technologies/what-is-a-highly-distributed-architecture]
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h3. Light & Powerful

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Petals ESB is entirely modular, making it a light, loosely-couplde platform, without the requirement to deploy to an existing application server. Numerous components are already available for message exchange (FTP, SOAP, REST, POP...) and services creation (POJO, Quartz, XSLT, Talend...)
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!Images^BUS_composants.png|width=800px|align=center!

{petalslink}Ajouter include > liste des composants avec description sur une ligne. Ajouter schéma d'exemple montrant un enchaînement de services externe > ESB > externe.{petalslink}

h3. Standard and Open Source

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Petals ESB is one of the few to be fully compliant with the Java Business Integration specification. It makes full use of standards protocols.
As an open source product, you can freely adapt it to fit your need, be it through a new component or container adaptation, or ask any expert to do it for you, without being bound to Petals Link (although we are probably the finest experts on these matters).
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{petalslink}créer la page JBI dans le glossaire, la lier ici. Trouver une illustration intéressante sur le sujet. Trouver un article sur les bienfaits de l'open source.{petalslink}

h3. Ease of Configuration

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Setting up services, orchestrating them, transforming messages, can prove a hassle from middle-sized projects on. [Petals Studio|petalsstudio:] greatly facilitates these steps, by providing numerous service creation wizards, import/export tools, a graphical interface to create services orchestrations.
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{petalslink}Améliorer screenshots et mettre légendes. {petalslink}

h3. Ease of Administration

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One of Petals ESB's most useful add-on is the [Web Console|webconsole:], web-GUI to easily watch and administer the ESB: deployement of new services units and assemblies, components management, fine-grained technical monitoring, testing facilities.
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h3. Business-oriented monitoring

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While previous items appealed more to developers and system administrators, Petals View is aimed more at non-technical users. Once Petals View has been set up and connected by the former, end-users can further configure fine-grained, detailed business reports on any message exchange going through Petals ESB. With this, they can easily follow their business procedures, identify any problem and use this data to build process efficiency analyses.
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!petalsview:Managing Referentials^ViewFlowRefStepEIP.png|width=40%|align=left! !petalsview:Supervising Flows^ViewFlow.png|width=40%|align=right!

{petalslink}Inclure des captures d'écran. {petalslink}

h3. Business-oriented services management

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In contrast with the Web Console, which allows technical deployment and management of services, Petals Master provides a graphical way to manage services from a business point of view. Associate services to roles, users and company to build a structured business-oriented view of all your services, document them with attached documents. All of this allows better business management, processes improvement and optimal reuse of services. Thus ensuring a proper evolution of your infrastructure.
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