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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 communicate in a common or protocol neutral manner. ServiceMix is an implemenation of JSR 208, the JBI specification, and it facilitates the communications between applications.

The Basic example shows how two external ¹ applications communicate to each other via the ServiceMix ESB. The techniques used in the Basic example could be used to integrate any external application with ServiceMix and allow it to communicate with another external application or a component within ServiceMix itself. Examples of applications that may need to be accessible to other applications are SAP, Peoplesoft, spreadsheets, etc.POJOs, or POJOs and EJBs that need to communicate with each other or with a legacy application. In the Basic example, the external applications communicate using the same protocol, JMS. Therefore, they could communicate directly with each other. The Basic example is a simplification to enable us to concentrate on the logical flow of the messages rather than the details of transforming one type of message into another.

A common scenario in which an enterprise service bus may be used is for a Web-based form to request data from a legacy application. The Web-based form communicates via HTTP which the legacy application does not understand. Using the ESB, the communication between the applications would flow like this:

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