In this chapter, we saw that the ESB concept was developed out of necessity, and had many catalysts. We also explored the following:
The ESB provides a pervasive, event-driven SOA, which is based on requirements of IT architects working together with vendors to build broad-scale integration networks using messaging, standard integration services, and standard interfaces.
e-Marketplaces provided a fertile breeding ground for scalable and secure ESB infrastructure capable of supporting the needs of large trading hubs with potentially thousands of trading partners. Out of this environment, the requirements of sophistication routing across segregated data channels were identified.
The proliferation and reasonable maturity of standards has provided the benefits of standards-based integration.
Application servers have their place in IT infrastructure as containers for housing business logic. An ESB architecture can provide a loosely coupled integration fabric for integrating application servers with other application servers and cross-platform applications at large.
Remote ESB service containers obviate the need to install integration brokers at every remote site to be integrated.