Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13

The Enterprise Service Bus

In This Chapter

Catching the enterprise service bus (ESB)

Figuring out ESB components

Taking a road trip on the ESB

You’ve probably ridden a bus, maybe to school or to work. You find the bus you want, you get on it, and it takes you where you want to go. You know approximately how long it will take to arrive at your destination (barring any delays). If traffic is backed up, the driver will take an alternative route to get you where you want. The concepts are the same for understanding an enterprise service bus (ESB).

The Enterprise Service Bus provides a technique of moving messages between services. While there are many types of messaging services, the ESB is a packaging of different styles of messaging combined with registry services and security. It’s an important way that organizations are able to create a scalable SOA environment without hand coding the way services are connected together.

A bus is a bus

Most of us know the term bus as it is used in computer hardware — as a place where you can plug in different computer peripherals. Most modern desktop PCs have slots inside the case where you can plug in PCI bus cards. Older IBM-compatibles had Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus slots. A bus is a more general form of interface port. It is designed to accept a variety of devices. For example, older PCs had separate ports for a mouse and for a keyboard. That’s pretty much all you could plug in to them. Newer machines have Universal ...