ESB Core Capabilities

Posted on February 27, 2009
Filed Under Tech Talk | Leave a Comment

I’ve been researching ESB’s lately and thought it’d be good to post a list of core capabilities requirements for an ESB. The main reason behind this is, all the vendors out there with ESBesque products just try to market a whole lot of fluff. This info will provide you a starting point when you start researching on ESB’s and what to expect of them.

Routing

Message routing according to specific business needs
Static/deterministic routing
Policy based routing
Rules base routing
Ultimately provide service location transparency

Message Transformation

Transform an incoming message into several outgoing formats and structure
Ex. XML to Json, XML to Java objects etc

Message Enhancement

Ability to isolate the client and make some basic changes to the message
Ex. change date format of incoming message
Append informational data to messages

Protocol transformation

The ability to accept one input protocol and communicate with another service provider on a different protocol
Physical components, include the actual protocol, HTTP to RMI or IIOP etc.
Logical aspect deals with the type of message
Feature provided through adapters

Service mapping

Transform a business service to the actual implementation service
Knowledge of the various services
Static/deterministic mapping of a service to a particular IP and port
Feature provided through a service lookup or a service registry

Message processing

Ability to manage state and perform request management, by accepting an input and provide an response back to the calling agent
Guaranteed message delivery
Management of message transactions
Reliable messaging, asynchronous/synchronous messaging, publish/subscribe

Process choreography & Service Orchestration

Manage complex business services to perform a business operation.
Manage process flow
Service orchestration is the ability to manage the coordination of multiple service implementations
Process choreography is about business services and service orchestration is coordination of their actual implementations
Abstract business services from actual implemented services.

Transaction management

Ability to provide a single unit of work for a business request, providing framework for coordination of multiple disparate systems.
Frameworks to be utilized
- JSR 95 Activity scope
- WS-Coordination