ESB as the Global Dataspace

Current ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) infrastructures provide a way of message queuing combined with Web service technologies. That is why the use of an ESB infrastructure is very appropriate to implement EDA and SOA solutions and to combine both styles of architecture. (See How EDA extends SOA and why it is important)

An ESB infrastructure is very well suited to function as the container of the business events to be published. This makes the published business events widely available for subscription. The ESB infrastructure behaves as the enterprise’s global dataspace uniformly accessible by all applications, regardless of location, time and back-end technology. See figure 1.

Figure 1: ESB as a global dataspace

An ESB needn’t be a one-vendor product. As technology homogeneity increases, interoperability increases and the need for product homogeneity decreases. In a federated company multiple service bus products may be in use. This allows for local autonomy. A corporate service bus serves as the global dataspace and supports semantic harmonization for the entire organization. All business events are published in this global dataspace to make them company wide available in a canonical format; of course in a secured way. See figure 2.

Figure 2: ESB as a composite structure

Using common Web service technologies makes propagation of the messages across multiple vendor products relatively easy to implement. See figure 3.

Figure 3: Propagation of events