Why ESBs are Made for Event-Driven Architecture

Recently I posted an article on how EDA extends SOA and why it is important. I am very pleased this article is gaining popularity in the SOA/EDA community. The posting is also available as a downloadable PDF, which I frequently extend with additional content.

But what I like most is that Dave Chappell of Progress Software (the inventor of the ESB) contributed a two-part article to eBizQ where he explains the most important role of an ESB to implement the ideas I defined in my article. Thank you Dave... Maybe these pictures can help you evangelizing the concept; feel free to use them as you wish.

Some interesting quotes from Dave's article:

• "...the real sweet spot where an ESB has shown its power and flexibility is in process-oriented, event driven architectures."




• "...the key to success is to have an architecture that allows for each application to be decoupled from the rest of the SOA by using the ESB as a form of mediation."




• "...the event-driven interaction style is a major advantage of keeping applications decoupled from one another."




• "...the applications themselves often need to be written or adapted to this event driven style of interaction."




• "The course of action taken when a complex pattern of events is identified may vary, but can range from alerting a business user in a Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) dashboard or to invoke a service or a business process via the ESB."




• "Event-driven architectures are beginning to emerge as the best approach toward implementing a SOA where applications are truly decoupled from each other. Large scale SOA projects using an ESB are broadening the reach of application integration in ways that were never before possible.




• "...these technologies can all generally be used both standalone and pluggable into anything using Web services interfaces..."