ESBs enable various applications and components to communicate with each other in a predictable way for service-oriented architecture (SOA) . With the 1.0 release, Apache Synapse has gone beyond its initial roadmap and is providing more functions and more performance than had originally been anticipated.

"We've done huge amounts of pretty cool stuff in here like non-blocking transport," Paul Fremantle, Apache Web Services PMC Member and Vice President of Technical Sales at WSO2 Inc., told internetnews.com. "The result is we took longer but we got more out of it."

Not just more features but more performance, as well. Fremantle explained that he had expected Synapse to perform well, but when they started doing the tests it beat expectations. According to Fremantle, the processing overhead for Synapse is low and it scales up to multiple thousands of concurrent connections without dropping messages.