In his blog Steve Vinoski of IONA correctly states that “Unfortunately the term ‘ESB’ is not at all clear. For some, it implies the centralized entity. … It's just EAI all over again.” blog. He goes on to say that Artix is an ESB, but “it's about as far from a centralized ESB as you can get.” IONA calls it an extensible ESB.

IONA delivers this extensibility through its adapter run time technology, which allows a CORBA service to be implemented by configuring a metadata-driven profile, thereby enabling new services to be configured dynamically. Different transformation engines, management frameworks, orchestration or BPM solutions, can easily be plugged into the ESB to extend functionality.

IONA is offering two ends of the ESB spectrum – a high performance solution and an open source solution. Artix is being positioned as a high-end, high-performance, high-availability ESB which includes load balancing and security. Artix ESB is aimed at high-end mission critical environments. It now also runs on the mainframe. The Artix ESB can expose COBOL copybooks, PL1, CICS and IMS as WSDL interfaces. It can also go the other way. It can be used to develop the Web services and then generate the COBOL copybooks.

IONA recently introduced the Celtix Open Source ESB. Celtix is a base level, 100% Java ESB. So far thousands of developers have downloaded Celtix, and there are a few developers now contributing code. Celtix is being hosted by the ObjectWeb community (www.objectweb.org). IONA is planning code drops every six weeks. For SOA tooling, IONA is planning facilities for configuring the ESB at design time and dynamically making changes at run time to the end points. The IONA tools are Eclipse-based, making it a totally open solution.

Open source is clearly becoming important to IONA’s strategy. Of course IONA then plans to sell plug-ins to the ESB for different transports, security, high availability, and transaction monitoring, as well as maintenance, support and professional services.

What, if any, are your plans for open source? Are you currently looking for an open source ESB?

Posted by bethgb in Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (0)

ESBs are a very hot topic right now - one of the most popular topics on ebizQ. In fact, ESBs are being touted as an integral part of an SOA infrastructure. However, there is still some question as to exactly what an ESB is. Here are some examples I found on the Web.

From Webopedia: “Short for Enterprise Service Bus, also referred to as a message broker. ESB is an open standards-based distributed synchronous or asynchronous messaging middleware that provides secure interoperability between enterprise applications via XML, Web services interfaces and standardized rules-based routing of documents. http://isp.webopedia.com/TERM/E/ESB.html

This definition describes the functionality of an ESB. This definition essentially says the ESB is synonymous with the term message broker. It also says the ESB is standards-based. However, while most message brokers now support Web services, the underlying technology typically is not standards-based. The definition also defines an ESB as having a distributed architecture as opposed to a centralized hub-and-spoke architecture that many message brokers have. This is an active point of contention. Gartner, for example, does not think that architecture is part of what defines an ESB - but it has more to do with Web services. It is also interesting to note that the definition says the ESB provides standardized rules-based routing, although there are no current standards for rules-based routing – just the message formats and communication protocols. The routing engines and algorithms are generally proprietary.

The Computing Dictionary defines an ESB as “A message broker that supports Web services.”
(http://computing-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/ESB). Short and to the point. This would mean that all message brokers (which at this point all support Web services) are also ESBs. In fact, many vendors are taking the approach of renaming and/or repositioning their brokers as ESBs.

Bitpipe defines an ESB as “An enterprise integration architecture that allows incremental integration driven by business requirements, not technology limitations.” (http://www.bitpipe.com/tlist/ESB.html).
This one makes me LOL. What does it even mean?

According to Brenda Michelson, Senior Vice President and Senior Consultant/Analyst at Patricia Seybold Group, “An ESB is an open standards, message-based, distributed, integration solution that provides routing, invocation, and mediation services to facilitate the interactions of disparate distributed information technology resources (applications, services, information, platforms) in a reliable manner.” You can check out Brenda’s two-part Enterprise Service Bus Q&A on ebizQ (http://www.ebizq.net/hot_topics/esb/features/6117.html?page=1).
This definition defines the ESB as a standards-based technology. Brenda does not equate message brokers with ESBs.

How would you define an ESB? Have you implemented, or are you currently implementing, or planning to implement an ESB in your company? Please share your experience for the benefit of the entire community.

Posted by bethgb in Industry Trends | Permalink | Comments (0)