Apache Camel is an open source integration platform.
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Mule ESB
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Mule ESB, from Mulesoft, is an open source middleware solution.
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Premier Bank Platform
Score 6.4 out of 10
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Financial technology company Fiserv offers the Premier Bank Platform to banking institutions, providing an environment to integrate data and manage bank operations in a simplified browser-based interface.
Message brokering across different systems, with transactionality and the ability to have fine tuned control over what happens using Java (or other languages), instead of a heavy, proprietary languages. One situation that it doesn't fit very well (as far as I have experienced) is when your workflow requires significant data mapping. While possible when using Java tooling, some other visual data mapping tools in other integration frameworks are easier to work with.
If you’re bringing anything into Salesforce you should just invest now into Mule, you will get your money’s worth and find a myriad of uses to build APIs between many other systems. Once you build a component you can easily reuse it as a building block to attach to another source/destination. This makes it easy to ramp up quickly and spread usage of Mule throughout your enterprise. A good value for medium to large companies, but probably cheaper to outsource your job to a consulting firm if you are smaller.
Premier Bank Platform is well suited for a banking environment, it wouldn't really make sense to use it in any other kind of environment. We are a medium sized bank who outsources Platform and it suits us fairly well. They are some issues with Fiserv from time to time but overall Platform allows us to complete our banking duties quickly and with relative ease. Fiserv takes care of updating all aspects of Platform for us so from an IT perspective it saves us a lot of headaches. Most end users are satisfied with Platform, the only grumbling you'll typically hear about is when the service is unavailable.
Camel has an easy learning curve. It is fairly well documented and there are about 5-6 books on Camel.
There is a large user group and blogs devoted to all things Camel and the developers of Camel provide quick answers and have also been very quick to patch Camel, when bugs are reported.
Camel integrates well with well known frameworks like Spring, and other middleware products like Apache Karaf and Servicemix.
There are over 150 components for the Camel framework that help integrate with diverse software platforms.
It is best suited for Rest API development. Mule ESB uses RAML as an API descriptor which is less complex and easy to understand. RAML is an open standard majorly supported by Mulesoft. Once RAML is developed, it is very easy (a few clicks)to create flows corresponding to the resources defined in the RAML. One can also include JSON schema validation in RAML, and with the use of APIkit router, Mule ESB makes the request validation very easy (it's automatic basically.)
Mule ESB comes with a large spectrum of community and enterprise connectors. We have connectors for all the major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, SAP, etc. This enables Mule ESB to integrate with the other systems in a faster and more robust way. Mule ESB has many components to fulfill the requirements of each integration (for example batch processing, parallel processing, choice, etc.)
Mule API gateway is one of the best tools (modules) of Mulesoft's offering. It supports API governance and management very well. One can easily enforce policies on their APIs with API gateway. It enables some of the must-have features in an API solution (i.e. throttling, oAuth, access levels, etc.)
Implementing a CI/CD (DevOps) environment for Mule ESB is a very easy task. Mule majorly uses MAVEN as its build tool, which in turn makes it best suitable for CI/CD approach. Mule also provides MAVEN plugins for auto deployments to the servers. Mule also has a best Unit testing module which is MUnit. MUnit can be used for both Unit and Functional testing, and it is easy to write and generates coverage reports in various formats.
Because the Premier Bank Platform is developed by Fiserv, a very large company, there are considerable resources to continue to develop Premier and roll out new solutions.
It holds most all of our customer data in one central location and transfers that data to other Fiserv apps fairly well.
It is fairly intuitive and most users pick up on it quickly.
The software itself is currently a bit dated, but it will be overhauled here sometime in 2019.
We outsource the platform and sometime the connections to Fiserv are not reliable which cause the platform to be unusable.
Fiserv has several different platforms and Premier seems to be the most dated of the bunch, again that appears to be changing in 2019 but in the interim it still remains an issue
The customer support can sometimes be lacking when facing issues with the platform, they will tell you they'll fix it later but give no time frames as to when that might be.
If you are looking for a Java-based open source low cost equivalent to webMethods or Azure Logic Apps, Apache Camel is an excellent choice as it is mature and widely deployed, and included in many vendored Java application servers too such as Redhat JBoss EAP. Apache Camel is lacking on the GUI tooling side compared to commercial products such as webMethods or Azure Logic Apps.
Very fast time to market in that so many components are available to use immediately.
Error handling mechanisms and patterns of practice are robust and easy to use which in turn has made our application more robust from the start, so fewer bugs.
However, testing and debugging routes is more challenging than working is standard Java so that takes more time (less time than writing the components from scratch).
Most people don't know Camel coming in and many junior developers find it overwhelming and are not enthusiastic to learn it. So finding people that want to develop/maintain it is a challenge.
Platform is absolutely critical to our daily bank operations. It's a bit on the expensive side to setup and maintain but in the end worth the money because of the complete coverage it provides in daily business functions.
There are several competitors to Platform but Premier is what our bank has used for many years, even before it's Fiserv acquisition, and what many employees are comfortable with. A switch would involve a massive investment in retraining.
A negative impact can be on when there are outages or mishaps on Fiserv's side. Fiserv has a tendency to not compensate you even when they should be obligated to. They seem to play the outlast you game where they hope you will give up and stop asking.
