June 10, 2007

What is an ESB?

The ESB is the Trust Domain. The Trust Domain is the ESB.

Without trust there is no integration. The ESB is a bridge between systems that were never intended to communicate or integrate.

What is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)?

An ESB an application layer firewall. It is a protocol layer transformer. It is a message payload any-to-any and XML schema transformer. It is a passive transaction payload audit logger. The ESB is a layer of abstraction, that must be highly performant and highly available, and most of all the ESB must be heterogeneous in nature. The value that the ESB provides is directly proportionate to the number of systems that it can securely and rapidly integrate without introducing latency to the transaction.

The ESB must be secure and fast.

The ESB must scale horizontally.

The ESB must be a federated ESB, comprised of many ESBs.

We will next explore the concept of ESB support services.

ESB Support Services include:

• A Business Rules Engine (Fine Grained XACML Security Policy Decision Points, Policy Information Points, Policy Adminstration Points, and Policy Enforcement Points, and a JSR-94 compliant RETE engine to ensure that rules are processed in the correct sequence)
  
• XA / ACID Transaction Processing to ensure that the business transaction is only reported complete once all of the related system level transactions have completed.
  
• Web Application Firewall (AAA, SSO)
  
• Web Services XML Firewall (AAA, Payload Inspection, XML Schema Validation)
• XSLT Acceleration (Text to XML , XML to XML, XML t0 HTML, Any to Any)
  
• Multi-Protocol Transformation (HTTP - TIBCO - MQ - JMS - ODBC - FTP - SMPT, etc.)
  
• Exemption Handling / Error Logging
• System and Event Logging
• Business Compliance Transaction Logging