The purpose of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), also known as a Java Business Integration (JBI) bus, is to provide a mechanism for different applications to exchange messages in a protocol neutral manner and provide services for processing those messages such as message transformation and dynamic routing. Although not a requirement, messages exchanged between business applications are typically done asynchronously. ServiceMix is an implemenation of JSR 208, the JBI specification.
The Basic example demonstrates how external 1 applications communicate via the ESB. Similar techniques could be used to plug any external application or service into ServiceMix (e.g. SAP, Peoplesoft, spreadsheets, POJOs, Webservices and EJBs) and allow it to communicate with other external applications or components within ServiceMix itself.
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A common business scenario, which extends the Basic Example, is that of a large department store distributor. This distributor sells products from many wholesalers to many retail outlets (i.e., department stores). The distributor presents a common interface for product ordering to each of its department store customers. However, each wholesaler presents a different ordering interface to the distributor for the product the wholesaler supplies.
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