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My organisation is in the science & health sectors and currently uses JCAPS to integrate some of its applications and third parties. These include STARLIMS and SAP amongst others.

The JCAPS expert has left the organisation and now there is talk of replacing JCAPS with another product. One teams is suggesting Orion Health Rhapsody Integration Engine and another team is suggesting Microsoft Biztalk.

The remaining developers in the organisation are skilled in Microsoft tools and not Java.

I do not have much experience with ESBs, having zero with JCAPS and Rhapsody, but I did do some Biztalk work about 5 - 6 years using either Biztalk 2004 or 2006. So my knowledge of this area is light.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of these three products? A comparison would be great. Why would one choose one of these products over the other?

John Mills
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I don't know if you've already figured this out or not, but here goes.

I can't really answer about Biztalk and Rhapsody, but I can talk at great length about JCAPS, so I hope this helps.

First, I've been a java and JCAPS developer for 7 years in an enterprise with about 10 other developers and many projects that live on JCAPS. In it's simplest form, JCAPS is really just a bunch of plugins and layers that create enterprise java applications for your using business rules that you define.

Second, JCAPS is basically dying\going away\EOL. I'd look for\pick just about any option that will suit your needs, or start looking for someone who knows it: it's not exactly trivial to pick up on your own.

Lastly, we've been down the ESB selection route and that conversation supersedes an answer on SO. It's a long and complex topic that will vary on many things: size of your organization, how your ESB will be used, who will be using it (BA's, Devs, Operations), how much you're willing to pay, what kind of support you need, what kind of backing technology you have on site, and much, much more that I am probably missing.

I hope this helps!

javamonkey79
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Orion Rhapsody is much easier to work with than BizTalk. We actually replaced our BizTalk orchestrations with Rhapsody because it was so difficult to get BizTalk to do exactly what we wanted. I've been administering and developing Rhapsody routes since version 2.4 and I would highly recommend contacting Orion Health for a demo. You don't have to know Java to use Rhapsody. It is programmed in Java so that it runs on Windows and Unix/Linux servers.

OnoMrBill
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I am working on integration using Rhapsody for more than last two years and I find it very friendly and makes our tasks much easier. Also, it has a very active forum to discuss/share any issues/ideas anytime online. I do not know much about Biztalk and JCAPS.

Ashique
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