Sunday, July 20, 2003

Defining the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)

The ESB or Enterprise Service Bus seems to be the acronym of the quarter. I've been debating some ways to describe the ESB, here are some of my attempts:

"It is a means for a message queue company (like Sonic and Spirit) to make it seem like they do web services when they really spent the majority of their time doing JMS based queues."

or

"It is a cool sounding buzz-phrase that will lure not-so-smart software developers towards a Java API that sounds like it has something to do with web services. On occassion, they will re-describe the JMS API via WSDL!!!"

or

"Queuing companies realized that the message queue was essential in an asynchronous, document based service oriented network - thus, they created a cool phrase that steals from three predecessors ("Enterprise" from J2EE, "Service" from SOA, and "Bus" from either CORBA or hardware buses)."

Just kidding of course... but I do think it is a dumb term. For goodness sake, A BUS? Has anyone ever looked at the topology of a service network? :-)

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