jancology.com

This is a book which offers an overview on the “Enterprise Service Bus” and is aimed for technical architects and CIO/CTO type of managers. It explains where and how it differs from a normal Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) or Application Server architecture. David takes quite a long time before he explains the technical components of this architecture and how they all tie together. Having read this now I think an ESB is a good architecture assuming you have enough computing resources ‘in’ the bus to do any translation and also to cope with the — in my opinion large — overhead in message size. There is also a nice architecture diagram on how to move from an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) system based on FTP to a completely compatible system using ESB and uniform message formats without changing the existing applications.

David Chappel is vice president and chief technology evangelist for Sonic Software. Sonic is one of the companies first pioneering the ESB. It is therefor nice to see that Sonic is also showing now as Visionaries in Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Web Services. Unfortunatly I miss a well known dutch company which seems to have disappeared from it…