From DeveloperWorks, What’s new in IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus V6.1

Check out the latest features introduced into IBM WebSphere Enterprise
Service Bus V6.1 and its associated tooling, IBM WebSphere Integration Developer.
This article describes the transport protocol binding, data
bindings, and administrative and mediation support. You should have basic
knowledge of the features and functions of previous versions of WebSphere Enterprise
Service Bus to follow along with this article.

For my money the top new features are:

1. Enhanced custom mediation support: Custom Mediations can have n input terminals and n output terminals.
2. Business Object Mapping runtime added: Thank you! I never understood why something as fundamental as BO Maps weren’t available in mediation flows.
3. The XSLT mapping editor has been updated: See you later crummy old XSLT editor and hello new XSLT editor that behaves like the Business Object mapper from process server modules.
4. Service Invoke primitive: No more abusing ‘custom mediations’ to actually do service invocation. We’ve got our own primitive.
5. Fan Out and Fan In mediation primitives. Oh my, looks like we’ve got more process choreography primitves in this release. In 6.0.2 you could only execute one path from start to finish. With these primitives you can finally perform multiple.

In Summary, it looks like the line between when to choose a mediation module vs a process server module is thinning. With a mediation module in v6.1 I have yet another full suite of primitives I can use to author complicated composite business services.

I noticed that theres no mention in the article about performance improvements. Lets hope that it’s just a tool-centric article and not an ‘admission via exclusion’ that things haven’t gotten better.

I’m glad to see this functionality included, it was sorely missed. There were a ton of scenarios I encountered in the field where the v6.0.2 mediation module made no sense (or worse, allowed you to author a mediation with no errors that couldn’t run). It’s good to see that IBM realized that too.