Ever wondered how heterogeneous applications communicate with each other? e.g. A Java application that needs to communicate with a .Net application. And not just one-to-one communication. Consider use cases where there are several applications talking to more than one applications. How does it happen? Does each application need to implement an interface for every other application? Enterprise Service Bus i.e. ESB comes to your rescue.
What is Enterprise Service Bus?
ESB implements a communication system between various applications which need to communicate with each other. The primary goal of ESB is to enable faster integration between Enterprise applications commonly referred as EAI.
Consider a set of applications which need to communicate with each other. This is a heterogeneous set and each one talks separate standard, protocol. And many of them need to talk to more than one applications. ESB removes the need that each application needs to implement communication with more than one other applications. If one tries to implement point-to-point communication between apps, it is going to get messy. Changing one part would result inĀ breaking something else. ESB handles the communication transparently and hence eases up the process of communication.
Key capabilities of ESB
- Transport protocol conversion – JMS to file
- Message transformation
- Routing e.g. content based routing
- Message enhancement e.g. Order data that only has a client ID can be enhanced to pass Order Data and client details together to next level. In this case, client details are pulled from a different source and the incoming message is “enhanced” with additional client data before passing it to next application.
- Security / Authorization – incoming messages are checked for required authorization before processing them further.
- Mediation
- Monitoring
Key providers of EnterpriseĀ Service Bus software
- Microsoft BizTalk Server
- MuleSoft
- Oracle Enterprise Service Bus
- Tibco Software
- Apache ServiceMix
Related Links
Related Keywords
Software Architecture, Service Oriented Architecture