| Integration is making a comeback perhaps it never even left. In this book you'll be introduced to the next generation of integration, called Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). ESB is really exciting in that it introduces battle-ready integration principles in a new way using open standards, messaging, and loosely coupled Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles. The costs of using proprietary integration solutions will soon become something of the past. Integration solutions will always be required, but companies can look forward with enthusiasm knowing that upcoming solutions will be based on open standards and common integration principles, especially in the area of web services and SOA. Soon, the new game in town will be integration products competing on who best supports systemic requirements (scalability, availability, performance, etc.), and not on specific product features. Not only that, the new desire to push toward SOA forces organizations to rethink their existing environment and create architectures that are based on coarse-grained, loosely coupled, shared services. However, we all know that performing the magic of "gluing" these services together is no small task. It requires new thinking in both business and technology solutions. And, in the past, because there were virtually no integration standards and few agreed-upon repeatable integration patterns, proprietary integration products were really the only option. Now that's all about to change, and that is what this book is about. What I like about this book is that Dave shows us how ESB brings integration solutions to those of us who want to focus on integration architectures and solutions. The ESB concept, as the backplane of a highly distributed integration network, allows us to think about the architecture and the best way to design and architect our solutions using an event-driven SOA, without having to deal with specialized integration approaches and becoming middleware surgeons. It allows us to focus on how we want to architect our solutions without conforming our requirements to what a product offers. There are two areas in this book that particularly excite me. First, as an architect of enterprise Java© solutions I am excited about the synergy between the ESB and Java Business Integration (JBI/JSR-208). JBI combined with an ESB is a godsend to those who have felt locked into proprietary integration products and solutions. JBI increases the proliferation of integration technology by providing a standards-based container environment in which integration processing elements run as services. These processing elements may include BPEL engines, XSLT transformers, routing engines, dispatchers, and any other integration feature engine you can think of. An ESB can provide its own JBI container environment or can integrate with one provided by another vendor. What's very cool about this is that it enables an ecosystem where ESB vendors such as Sonic can now focus on coordination, transport, and routing of a highly distributed and consistently managed SOA backplane, while at the same time providing an environment in which JBI processing engines can flourish. Second, as a design-patterns person I am also excited by this book's use of ESB components in pattern-based approaches to integration, which are used to explain the capabilities of an ESB. Even more interesting is that Dave chose to leverage and extend the "Gregor-grams" from the Enterprise Integration Patterns book by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf. In the EIP book, there is a wonderful use of visuals to depict various patterns for enterprise messaging. The ESB patterns used throughout this book show the visual construction of loosely coupled, service-based integration patterns to create larger-grained solutions, or micro-architectures, which leverage the ESB architecture to uniquely solve complex integration problems in simple ways. This concept alone is reason enough to buy this book. The visual metaphor lends itself wonderfully to composing integration solutions and really helps the integration architect represent the architecture visually and form a complete ESB solution. The nice thing about any loosely coupled, messaging-based solution is that you tend to add new feature elements as requirements dictate. Using patterns to compose the ESB features allows you to not only add the integration features as needed, but also to see the visual architecture as it evolves. I really think SOA built upon ESB is the next wave in integration. Read this book and decide for yourself. It is sure to open up new ways of thinking about solving any and all of your integration challenges. - John Crupi
- Sun Distinguished Engineer
- Coauthor, Core J2EE Patterns
- Bethesda, MD April 2004
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