Chapter 1. The world of open source ESBs
In this chapter:
If you ask integration specialists and architects to supply one buzzword used in the integration market today, enterprise service bus (ESB) would be one of the predominant answers. Concepts like service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) would also be mentioned. These buzzwords sound interesting, but are they just part of the hype in the integration market or do they represent real business value?
As with every buzzword in the integration industry, a sales pitch is involved, but these concepts have a business case. Other books are available that focus on SOA (such as Understanding Enterprise SOA by Eric Pulier and Hugh Taylor [Manning, 2005]). In this book we focus on the enterprise service bus, but we also discuss some interesting open source products related to SOA and BPM.
There’s a lot of confusion about what an ESB is, so let’s start off with an overview of the most important functionality that should be present in a product calling itself an ESB. Many ESB products are available in the market, from vendors like IBM, TIBCO, Microsoft, and Oracle. Most ESB vendors offer products that have a background in the enterprise application integration (EAI) market. As we’ll see in section 1.1, this is not so strange, because ESB functionality has a lot in common with the older EAI products.