Page History

...

The purpose of this document is to briefly introduce the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB); what it is, what it does, and its uses. This document will then . Then we will discuss ServiceMix as an ESB implementation based on the JBI standard JSR 208.

The Problem

Companies have multiple applications, multiple platforms and Enterprise networks commmonly deploy many applications on many platforms with many different business processes that need to integrate with each other. The applications, platforms and processes have non-compatible data formats and non-compatible communications protocols. If an enterprise needs to interface with external systems, the compatibility integration problem extends outside of a company to encompass its business partners' IT systems and processes as well.

In the past several years there have been serveral several technologies attempting to solve to this problem these problems such as Enterprise Applicaton Integration (EAI), Business-to-Business (B2B), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Web Services. These solutions addressed some of the integration issues, but were mostly proprietary, expensive, and time-consuming to implement. These solutions range from expensive solutions from vendors (cost, lock-in) to home-grown custom solutions (maintenance, cost). The overwhelming disadvantages of these solutions are cost and lack of flexibility due to being non-standard.

The ESB solves the integration problem without the flaws of the other solutions. The purpose of an ESB is to facilitate application and process integration by providing distributed processing, intelligent routing, security, and dynamic data transformation. In an ESB these services are provided so each application does not have to address these issues independently and in a proprietary manner; these are standard infrastructure services in an ESB.

Existing Solutions

In the past, companies have solved the EAI and B2B intergration problem with non-standard technologies. These solutions range from expensive solutions from vendors (cost, lock-in) to home-grown custom solutions (maintenance, cost). The overwhelming disadvantages of these solutions are the "point-to-point" model and lack of flexibility due to being non-standard.

The ESB Approach

The enterprise service bus addresses the disadvantages of existing solutions by creating a standard infrastructure for integration. Point-to-point solutions, where each of n components requires n-1 interfaces for full communication, are replaced by a bus solution where each component requires a single interface to the bus for global communication. In the past, if application A wanted to talk to applications B, C, and D, three interfaces were required.

...