Enterprise Service Bus
Have you come across multiple applications working together? Take for example an online shopping site. This would integrate with multiple vendor applications and payment gateways behind the scenes. Making these applications coordinate with each other and making them work coherently would be the critical part that decides its success. Called an enterprise application the architecture/design plays an important role in deciding the interface that will enable integration with other applications. This interface called as middleware is only responsible for making sure the information from one application to another is passed without fail and in a secure fashion. If the applications that we are talking about are services then what we are talking about is Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The ESB is a key enabler of the buzzword Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The technology choices around ESB are critical decisions performed by an architect that orchestrates the services working together. For example communicating with an application that acts as a payment gateway would require a secure communication and with either a successful or total failure transaction meaning you don’t want to pay but not get the product. A detailed three part series on “Enterprise Service Bus” is available on Dr. Dobb’s Portal.
