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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Looks promising, July 3, 2004
This review is from: Enterprise Service Bus: Theory in Practice (Paperback)
Chappell describes a highly promising but still speculative technology for connecting together enterprise-wide computations. It can also potentially be used to span different companies. Some of you may groan. Haven't we heard this already, several times? Remember the toutings of CORBA, Java's RMI, JMX, JMS, and the nascent Web Services? Well, ESB draws upon often bitter lessons learnt with these earlier endeavours. CORBA was widely found to be too complex. RMI works only for tightly coupled systems, which do not scale well. So that became one reason for JMS, because it enabled loose coupling. But JMS is too low level. Web Services may indeed be promising, but face a danger of overspecifying a standard before enough practical experience is garnered. ESB tries to subsume the best ideas from the above, and from other efforts. It promises loose coupling and an incremental rollout, amongst other things. The incremental ability may be key to getting a small scale project approved and implemented, due to its minimal investment. You could think of ESB as taking the ideas of the JMX management console a step further. Plus, ESB can use JMX as a subsidiary technology. Chappell also offers nice visual component schematics that could be used to represent and perhaps even assemble an ESB network. If this indeed is possible, it would be tremendous. Akin to the 1980s, when MicroSim offered a graphical version of Spice, with electronic parts availabled from a menu.
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30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
All sales, no sizzle, October 1, 2005
This review is from: Enterprise Service Bus: Theory in Practice (Paperback)
I was hoping that this book would go through the history of technology leading up to the ESB, discuss how the ESB solves the problems presented by previous solutions and talk about some best practices for building ESBs.
Unfortunately, the whole book goes right into the sale pitch telling you that ESB is the solution to problems that we previously were unable to solve! And, ESB appears to have no downsides! And, there are some great vendors out there that can solve all your problems!
EAI didn't work for you? That's because Hub-And-Spoke doesn't scale. But, the author doesn't spend any time on what people did to address these problems. How about distributed components? Of course, they didn't work... no exactly sure why, but ESB solves the problem!
The redeming part about this book is that it does provide a good overview of what an ESB is. It also provides you with a lot of terminology that may be new to you.
However, I wouldn't buy this book again or recommend it to anyone. Instead, I would recommend a lot of other good books on SOA that tell you about how we got here and how the technology pieces are around to help support new solutions to previously hard problems.
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must-read for integration architects, August 3, 2004
This review is from: Enterprise Service Bus: Theory in Practice (Paperback)
This book should be required reading for anyone involved with EAI, especially integration architects.
For those of you who may not have heard about ESB, it is a rather new approach to structuring a SOA (service-oriented architecture), using a distributed MOM infrastructure, XML messages, intelligent message routing, automatic transformation of messages, and centralized administration. The SOA approach to EAI solutions is compelling, but it is still too early in the game to tell if ESB will take the world by storm. It has a lot of promise, and many EAI vendors are jumping onto the bandwagon that Sonic, including Dave Chappell, helped to build.
The book offers the first comprehensive definition of an ESB that I have seen, almost entirely stripped bare of vendor-specific information and sales info. I say almost, for some issues (such as app-servers vs. ESB service containers) are presented in a less vendor neutral fashion than I would like. Overall, the book stays high on useful content, and low on vendor product positioning.
The books combines nicely described technical descriptions of ESB features with some high-level case studies culled from Dave's experiences in industry, or based on interviews with IT leaders that he conducted while researching the book.
The technical descriptions avoid becoming too detailed, but are sufficient to capture the essential issues encountered in integration. The book's diagrams, resembling Gregor-grams, are very useful, although I was a bit mystified to find a reference card for the glyphs used, tucked away in the back of the book. The diagrams are self-explanatory, IMHO.
The case studies are similarly abstract, avoiding introducing a level of detail that would cause the forest to be lost amongst the trees. At times I wished to a little more detail here, but I suspect I'm something of a glutton for punishment that way.
ESB is threatening to become something of a buzz word these days, what with IBM weighing into the ESB market. This book should help secure a rational, useful definition of Enterprise Service Bus before the marketing machines of the various integration vendors obliterate it in a storm of white papers and glossy brochures.
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