Saturday, June 30, 2007

ESB: Service Bus or Data Bus?

The ESB is a lot about messaging and therefore a better name perhaps would be "Enterprise Data Bus". It's the asynchronous messaging that needs such an infrastructure with persistency- and mediation facilities. All the WS-* standards are about messaging as well, leveraging the message itself to tell the infrastructure how the message has to be handled (see this). I think WS-* will make it possible to have the ESB evolve from a vendor-product to a concept implemented in the operating systems and network devices that understand WS-*. Then you can leave the prefix "Enterprise" and we will be ready for an universal asynchronous data bus over the Internet (or any other network you like). This will help breaking the current "services centric" idea of SOA into a "messages centric" perspective.

1 comment:

Jeff Zhuk said...

Jack,

Thank you for your post. It makes a lot of sense to me.

I also think that there is a need for a place (ESB?) to capture integrated views on a service from business and technology perspectives. I’d love to see there standard based tools for direct mapping between semantic expressions by subject matter experts (SME) and technology artifacts (see example of such an Enterprise Knowledge Bus). These tools and standards would allow SMEs early entrance into collaborative work together with technologists in SOA space.

Jeff Zhuk