Clarifying the ESB (NOT!)
I just came across the following article at
SearchWebServices which references a number of proponents of ESB (take a look
here for the other Neil's thoughts on that particular TLA du jour) and the JBI (
Java Business Integration) specification making, in my humble opinion, a number of dubious claims. For example, "We see JBI as the basic requirement for creating an ESB," and "When we first set out to create JBI over two years ago, we had a vision that one day JBI would help drive the shape of ESBs, much like the EJB spec drove the shape of application servers in the late '90s."
Now I could be wrong - and I am happy to be corrected - but it seems to me that JBI doesn't, contrary to the title of the article, help define an ESB and is certainly not the basic requirement for an ESB. Rather, combine a service bus with pluggable business integration components (based on standardised service provider interfaces) and don't you get a pluggable EAI solution - and a Java-only one to boot. But hold on ... isn't that where the likes of
Cape Clear,
PolarLake,
Sonic and others started in the heady days of web services euphoria: offering web services-based, lightweight EAI solutions.
This smacks of techno revisionism from the ESB crowd!
