Enterprise Service Bus: Theory in Practice (Cards)

~ David Chappell (Author)
Key Phrases: custom adapters, service invocations, connector architecture, Message Oriented Middleware, Partner Figure, Java Management (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Large IT organizations increasingly face the challenge of integrating various web services, applications, and other technologies into a single network. The solution to finding a meaningful large-scale architecture that is capable of spanning a global enterprise appears to have been met in ESB, or Enterprise Service Bus. Rather than conform to the hub-and-spoke architecture of traditional enterprise application integration products, ESB provides a highly distributed approach to integration, with unique capabilities that allow individual departments or business units to build out their integration projects in incremental, digestible chunks, maintaining their own local control and autonomy, while still being able to connect together each integration project into a larger, more global integration fabric, or grid.

Enterprise Service Bus offers a thorough introduction and overview for systems architects, system integrators, technical project leads, and CTO/CIO level managers who need to understand, assess, and evaluate this new approach. Written by Dave Chappell, one of the best known and authoritative voices in the field of enterprise middleware and standards-based integration, the book drills down into the technical details of the major components of ESB, showing how it can utilize an event-driven SOA to bring a variety of enterprise applications and services built on J2EE, .NET, C/C++, and other legacy environments into the reach of the everyday IT professional.

With Enterprise Service Bus, readers become well versed in the problems faced by IT organizations today, gaining an understanding of how current technology deficiencies impact business issues. Through the study of real-world use cases and integration patterns drawn from several industries using ESB--including Telcos, financial services, retail, B2B exchanges, energy, manufacturing, and more--the book clearly and coherently outlines the benefits of moving toward this integration strategy. The book also compares ESB to other integration architectures, contrasting their inherent strengths and limitations.

If you are charged with understanding, assessing, or implementing an integration architecture, Enterprise Service Bus will provide the straightforward information you need to draw your conclusions about this important disruptive technology.

From the Author

A note to book reviewer P. Pant, who wrote the negative comments about Java in your review that is posted below – I really appreciate that you point out that the book is "extremely well written". However, it appears that you have missed some key points in your reading of the book. An ESB is all about heterogeneity, therefore Java technology is a useful thing to be able to integrate with when using an ESB.

JMS, for example, is a well established standard for messaging, with broad industry support. It is one of the MANY ways to integrate with other applications through an ESB. I don’t mention it any more or any less than other standard technologies like XPath or XSLT. In fact, I have an entire chapter on "Message Oriented Middleware" which generically discusses MOM concepts such as store-and-forward messaging. At the end of the chapter is a small section on JMS and another equal amount of ink devoted to WS-Reliability and WS-ReliableMessaging. The final chapter, BTW is about how ESB’s and the Web Services stack of specifications (many of which I am co-author of) are going to evolve together.

Lastly, I appreciate that you have correctly recognized that "the concepts outlined nicely complement Hohpe's book on intergation patterns in my view". I worked with Gregor Hohpe during the writing of this book to ensure that the readers of both books would have a consistent visual metaphor when describing integration patterns. Dave

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Product Details

• Cards: 352 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media (June 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596006756
• ISBN-13: 978-0596006754
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #124,259 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Looks promising, July 3, 2004

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read for integration architects, August 3, 2004

By	Ronald A. Ten Hove (Massachusetts, USA) - See all my reviews

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.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ultimate ESB book, October 2, 2005

By	Paul Lopez "Paul" (Tucson, AZ) - See all my reviews

Frankly, I feel that some reviewers misunderstand the purpose of this book. In my opinion, for a SOA focussed professional who needs to know the role of SOA, this book is a gem! Any of us who have had the challenge of explaining messaging technology should be grateful about reading this book.

As technologists, we forget just how much intimidating jargon we use and how many underlying assumptions we make when we explain things. As a software architect once said to me, "if I had more time, I'd make it simple." Clearly Mr.Chappell has taken on the challenge of making it simple and made it in such a way even an idiot can understand, and such efforts are incredibly valuable.