Dec 16
For people less acquainted with the Integration world, the word Bus in “Enterprise Service Bus” causes many to believe that an ESB is something distributed. But on the contrary, 95% of ESB deployments are hub and spoke. One or a few servers located centrally through which all the messages pass. Distributed execution of integration logic remains the exception.
Therefore, we should maybe introduce the “ESH“, the Enterprise Service Hub?
Notes:
- Older integration solutions often had their adapters running on the same servers as the back-end applications or database, so away from the central message broker. But nowadays, also all the adapter logic is put in to the central hub.
- Obviously, every ESB can deployed in a distributed manner, interconnected by some messaging solution. But that’s definitely not the standard approach.
- Why is integration logic put centrally? One justification is to avoid disturbing the servers on which the back-end applications are running.
- Maybe lighter-weight, open source ESB’s will make distributed execution of integration logic more popular. E.g. with such open source ESB’s deployed along with a J2EE application.