Tech terminology. Exact definitions are often hard to come by. What do people really mean when they say SOA, or Web 2.0, or ESB? In a Microsoft blog by Nick Allen, Nick decided to track down and compare analyst and vendor definitions for the Enterprise Service Bus, ESB. Often these tech terms verge more on philosophy rather than on tangible implementation specifics.
Nick comments that Microsoft evades defining exactly what an ESB technology is, but does provide ‘guidance‘.
The definition of an ESB at Wikipedia is:
“Enterprise Service Bus” is a convenient catch-all term for a set of capabilities, which can be implemented in different ways.
Nick quotes IBM:
“An enterprise service bus (ESB) is a pattern of middleware that unifies and connects services, applications and resources within a business.”
And Oracle:
“It provides a much-needed intermediary layer that facilitates data delivery, service access, service reuse, and service management of an enterprise SOA implementation.”
InfoQ cites Gartner:
“A Web-services-capable infrastructure that supports intelligently directed communication and mediated relationships among loosely coupled and decoupled business components.”
And the Burton Group:
“ESBs are essentially integration systems, not SOA systems. SOA is about tearing down application silos, but integration systems reinforce those silos. [...] an ESB is especially good for bridging to legacy applications, and therefore it is a useful component in a services infrastructure.”
Im glad that’s finally cleared up!…
