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ESB

Enterprise Service Bus

An enterprise service bus (ESB) implements a communication system between mutually interacting software applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). It implements a software architecture as depicted in the picture. As it implements a distributed computing architecture, it implements a special variant of the more general client-server model, wherein, in general, any application using ESB can behave as server or client in turns. ESB promotes agility and flexibility with regard to high-level protocol communication between applications. The primary goal of the high-level protocol communication is enterprise application integration (EAI) of heterogeneous and complex service or application landscapes (a view from the network level).\ The concept is analogous to the bus concept found in computer hardware architecture combined with the modular and concurrent design of high-performance computer operating systems. The motivation for the development of ESB was to find a standard, structured, and general purpose concept for describing implementation of loosely coupled software components (called services) that are expected to be independently deployed, running, heterogeneous, and disparate within a network. ESB is also a common implementation pattern for service-oriented architecture.

An ESB applies the design concept of modern operating systems to independent services running within networks of disparate and independent computers. Like concurrent operating systems, an ESB provides commodity services in addition to adoption, translation and routing of client requests to appropriate answering services.

The primary duties of an ESB are:

  • Route messages between services

  • Monitor and control routing of message exchange between services

  • Resolve contention between communicating service components

  • Control deployment and versioning of services

  • Marshal use of redundant services

  • Provide commodity services like event handling, data transformation and mapping, message and event queuing and sequencing, security or exception handling, protocol conversion and enforcing proper quality of communication service