Various colleagues have blogged extensively on the forthcoming release of WebSphere ESB 6.0.2 – see the posts from Adrian, Chris, Andrew and Dave. Frankly, if you are interested in WESB at all then you should really be reading those blogs, since these four guys are top sources of information on the subject.
Although I’ve played with WebSphere ESB, I haven’t yet had cause to use it in the context of my day-to-day work, since I’ve been with Message Broker customers for much of the year. However, I do frequently come across the requirement for WebSphere Process Server to communicate with the Broker, and the new native WMQ bindings support provided in WPS and WESB 6.0.2 is going to simplify that. I can see that the option of connecting directly to a queue manager (rather than going through the MQLink from the SIBus) will simplify HA scenarios, one of which I’m looking at with a customer at the moment.
Incidentally, Process Server can of course already communicate with Message Broker using a variety of methods – off the top of my head they would be HTTP, JMS over MQ, and JMS via the MQLink (and the Broker’s JMS nodes can be configured to read from SIBus destinations, too). This new feature adds another option which improves the flexibility of WPS and WMB solutions.