It's time that agile integration become a feature of more applications, rather than a hand-crafted after-market exercise at the complex database and middleware tiers. Some 23 percent of software decision-makers have already implemented enterprise application integration software, and ...

While purchasing an ESB too early in a SOA project does substantially increase your risk of failure, all is not lost. After all, you're not alone; this mistake is one of the most prevalent SOA snafus in IT shops around the world today, and not all of those projects end up as failures. ...

Is ESB just an expensive integration hub or is there more to the story than we heard…

In the beginning, the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), was marketed as much more than an integration technology. While the core of an ESB is  certainly about connectivity between serv...

To be able to do anything useful, an ESB must be configured with all sorts of parameters, from endpoint connection URIs to message transformation scripts to content-based routing definitions. Moreover, ESBs like Mule can host custom components, which will process messages and perform u...

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) projects have evolved. A couple of years ago it would have been sufficient to demonstrate connectivity between systems that were previously isolated. Nowadays these connections must provide guarantees of reliability, security, and performance. Delive...

The emergence of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) over the past two years has spurred the deployment of componentized applications based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA enables the development of business systems and processes with loosely coupled components (often called...

Since releasing my latest book, Enterprise Service Bus (O'Reilly Media, 2004), I have been doing a fair amount of visiting corporations, conducting seminars, and generally discussing with enterprise architects the subject of enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) and how an ent...

I just got back from the Gartner Application Integration show. This is perhaps the seventh of these conferences I attended, including the first one back in 1998. The good news is that the conference was packed and application integration seems to be making a strong resurgence with a li...

Like pretty much everything that gets caught up in the IT hype cycle, the enterprise service bus (ESB) has taken on mythic capabilities. And, like pretty much everything that becomes the focus of myth, there's a kernel of truth embedded within all those super powers.

In the first article in this series (Vol. 4, issue 9), I described some of the middleware requirements necessary to support a full-function service-oriented architecture (SOA), and introduced the role of the enterprise service bus (ESB) in meeting those requirements.

The past several years have seen some significant technology trends, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), enterprise application integration (EAI), business-to-business (B2B), and Web services. These technologies have attempted to address the challenges of improving the results...

Enterprises have become increasingly sensitive to the need to become sense-and-response- enabled. That is, enterprises perceive a strategic need to be able to both respond faster and more effectively to, and initiate changes in their environment.

In this article (part 1 of two), I will discuss the role of the enterprise service bus (ESB) and other technologies in providing an infrastructure for service-oriented architecture (SOA) in the enterprise. This month, I'll discuss some of the middleware requirements necessary to suppor...