Enterprise Service Bus and Service Oriented Architecture (ESB and SOA)

Enterprise Service Bus and Service Oriented Architecture (ESB and SOA)


Web Services, ESB, SOA, infrastructure, business, integration, applications, enterprise service bus, distribution, orchestration, deployment, management, flexibility, architecture, resources, semantics, JAVA, Web Services


To integrate old and new, service-oriented architecture (SOA) needs an infrastructure that can connect any IT resource, whatever its technology or wherever it is deployed.

To be flexible, it needs an infrastructure that can easily combine and re-assemble services to meet changing requirements without disruption.

And to be dependable, it needs an infrastructure that is robust and secure.

This infrastructure is the enterprise service bus (ESB).

An ESB is software infrastructure that simplifies the integration and flexible reuse of business components within a service-oriented architecture.

An ESB provides a dependable and scalable infrastructure that connects disparate applications and IT resources, mediates their incompatibilities, orchestrates their interactions, and makes them broadly available as services for additional uses.

In most organizations, technological heterogeneity is more the rule than the exception.


An ESB generally provides an abstraction layer on top of an implementation of an enterprise messaging system, which allows integration architects to exploit the value of messaging without writing code.

Contrary to the more classical enterprise application integration (EAI) approach of a monolithic stack in a hub and spoke architecture, the foundation of an enterprise service bus is built of base functions broken up into their constituent parts, with distributed deployment where needed, working in harmony as necessary.

ESB does not implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) but provides the features with which one may be implemented.

ESB should be standards-based and flexible, supporting many transport mediums.

Based on EAI rather than SOA patterns, it tries to remove the coupling between the service called and the transport medium.

Most ESB providers now build ESBs to incorporate SOA principles and increase their sales, e.g. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).