This book came to me via David Chappell of Sonic Software, the "creators" of the Enterprise Service Bus. I therefore expected that it would be primarily focusing on the Sonice Software message. I was mistaken. This is an extremely useful and comprehensive overview of the architecture challenges facing us today.
In one respect, the idea of an Enterprise Service Bus is just a coming together of a number of technologies which we have all seen in the past, for example:
- Message Orientated Middleware (MOM)
- Application Servers
- Enterprise Application Integration (EIA) techniques
What the ESB concept tries to do, as I understand it, is to tie together these technologies in a consistent way and view the whole enterprise as a single loosely connected bus of activity.
There are many many practical discussions of, for example, the issues involved with loosely coupled message orientated middleware, compared with closely coupled protocols like Web Services.
To give you a flavour of the comprehensive high level view which David Chappell takes, there is an entire chapter devoted to the issues around XML, specifically how to ensure that we create applications that are extensible (Applications Bend, but Don't Break), issues of Content-Based Routing and Transformations, and how to put together a Generic Data Exchange Architecture
This is not just a book to sell Sonic's view of the ESB. Instead, it delivers a powerful understanding of what is involved in architecting modern Composite Applications, and some of the pitfalls.
