Enterprise Service Bus-Integration Demystified, Page 2

Applicability of ESB

The applicability of ESB is quite enormous. As ESB is a quicker way of realizing SOA; it is applicable wherever SOA is applicable.

Network management systems

ESB can be used to provide a consistent management interface for monitoring the health of various network elements like routers, hubs, switches, and so on.

Telecom

ESB can be used to expose telecom assets sich as SMS gateways and MMS gateways as parlay-X Web services, thus increasing the productivity as well as opening up of assets to external partners.

ESBs also can be used to integrate with OSS and BSS systems of a network operator.

Supply chain management

ESB can be used to publish and subscribe documents/events in the SCM system, integrate with back-end products, and provide content-based routing and transformation to process various documents.

Finance

ESB can be used asynchronously to process the trade order system and other applications via Web service interfaces.

ESB Vendors

Various vendors provide ESB. Existing middleware vendors, messaging system providers, Web service container providers, and J2EE container providers have ESB on their roadmap. Some of them are listed below:

• Cape Clear ESB—http://www.capeclear.com/products/
• Sonic ESB—http://www.sonicsoftware.com/products/sonic_esb/index.ssp
• Fiorano ESB—http://www.fiorano.com/products/fesb/fioranoesb.htm
• SeeBeyond eInsight—http://www.seebeyond.com/software/ican.asp
• Iona Artix—http://www.iona.com/products/artix/welcome.htm
• PolarLake ESB—http://www.polarlake.com/en/html/resources/esb/index.shtml

Conclusion

The purpose of this article is to introduce the basic concepts and a typical architecture of an ESB. Enterprises are moving towards standards-based integration technologies such as ESB, which offers them a highly scalable integration infrastructure solution. The complexity of traditional integration frameworks has been overcome by ESB. ESB helps enterprises scale in a more rapid fashion, without compromising reliability and performance. The purpose of this article is to introduce the basic concepts behind ESB. The authors are sure that the next wave of things to happen in EAI domain would be ESB because it standardizes and moves towards SOA.

References

What Is an Enterprise Service Bus?
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,35193,00.html

ESB definition at LooselyCoupled.com
http://looselycoupled.com/glossary/ESB

Mule—ESB Messaging Framework
http://mule.codehaus.org

The Enterprise Service Bus: Building Enterprise SOA
http://developer.bea.com/pub/a/2004/12/soa_ibarra.html

About the Authors

R Venkatavaradan has been working as a solution and product architect in various domains ranging from middleware, J2EE, and Web services to telecom and mobility. He has a Masters Degree from the School of Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He has about 14 years of industry experience. His field of work ranges from signal processing to Web services, J2EE, Enterprise Application Integration, and so forth. He has extensively worked on Web service technologies such as WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI, and provided technical consultancy to various projects in the field of mobile, telecom, and EAI, which have been architected based on Web service concepts. He can be reached at venkatavaradan@gmail.com.

Arulazi Dhesiaseelan is a senior developer for Hewlett-Packard Company, India. He has a Master's Degree in computer applications from PSG College of Technology in India. He has about five years of industry experience. He was involved in the UDDI4J project hosted at http://uddi4j.org. He has extensively worked on Web service technologies such as WSDL, UDDI, and SOAP. Currently, Arulazi is involved in developing ANA (adaptive network architecture)-based solutions for securing enterprise networks. He can be reached at aruld@acm.org.