- The functionality that ESB can provide can be summarised as “Message exchange between systems”
- Examples
– Data replication
– Exposure of technical functionality or data
– B2B - ebXML EDI FACT
– Protocol adaption and conversion
– Orchestration – controlling What happens When
- Enterprise Application Integration, or EAI is the unrestricted sharing of data and business processes throughout the networked applications or data sources in an organization
- Service Oriented Architecture or SOA is a way of thinking about IT assets as service components. When functions in a large application are made into stand-alone services that can be accessed separately, they are beneficial to several parties. (Source Wikipedia)
- Enterprise Service Bus or ESB is name given to the EAI platform in Orange UK that exposes IT functionality in the form of services.
– provider services are reusable technical building blocks
– orchestration services connect provider services in some combination to realise a business use-case suitable, for any client
– interaction services allowing a client access to any provider or orchestration service no the ESB
Characteristics of SOA
- Service Loose coupling
- Service contract
- Service encapsulation or abstraction
- Service re-usability
- Service compos ability
- Service autonomy
- Service optimization
- Service discover-ability
Characteristics of SOA - The ACID Test
- Service Composition directly effects the success of an SOA – where well composed services lead to greater ROI through technical and business reuse
– Atomic
– Consistent
– Isolated
– Durable
ESB can
- Connect to any application, data source or data sink through a rich adapter set exposing the data or functionality as a service.
- A Service:
– Encapsulates integration logic like branching, routing, evaluation etc
– Operates on a pipeline of data: mapping, translation, validation
– Have properties to control caching of results, execution audit trail, and resubmission.
- Dispatch options
– Pub / Sub (asynchronous invocation through document triggers)
– Direct invocation of C, Java, Web Service
– protocols e.g. SOAP-RPC, HTTP, FTP, SMTP (email), File Polling
– Description WSDL and IDD (MS-WORD)
- The Broker is the ESB’s messaging component. It enables queued message delivery between Integration Servers in the ESB or directly with external applications
– Information is held in an entirely called a Document
– A Document is the container for a message between a publisher and a subscriber
– Documents are populated with information from any source XML documents, flat files, SOAP-MSG
– Document Resubmission
- Implement business processes that orchestrate activities between different IT systems and departments.
- Achieved through combining documents and services where services are dispatched asynchronously in response to events.
- Context is stored in a database allowing monitoring of process state and resubmission of failed steps.
- Human interaction is permitted such as sign-off.
- Systems and applications of all shapes and sizes exist ready to exchange messages.
- In any given integration scenario applications can generally be categorised as producers or consumers of messages.













