Enterprise Service Bus

Chapter 6. Service Containers and Abstract Endpoints

In the next three chapters, we will examine the details of what makes an ESB. The ESB provides an architecture that brings together all the concepts described in previous chapters into an infrastructure that can span an extended enterprise and beyond. The base definition of an ESB provided by Gartner Inc. and discussed in Chapter 1, describes an ESB as consisting of four things: Message Oriented Middleware, web services, intelligent routing based on content, and XML data transformation.

Expanding on the definition from Gartner, we can go into more details of these key components:

• Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)

  • Robust, reliable transport

  • Efficient movement of data across abstract data channels

  • End-to-end reliability

• Web services

  • Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

  • Abstract business services

• Intelligent routing

  • Message routing based on content and context

  • Message routing based on business process rules

  • Business process orchestration based on a rules language such as BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services)

• XML transformation

  • Based on XSLT and independently deployed service types

The integration fabric that supports all of this requires an infrastructure, which includes the following:

• Highly distributed, scalable service containers

• Event-driven service invocation

• Centralized management of distributed integration configurations

• Diverse client connectivity and support for multiple protocols

• Seamless, dynamic routing of data across ...