What is an Enterprise Service Bus?

February 4, 2007   21:24

There is quite a lot of confusion about the Enterprise Service Bus because the leading ESB-providing companies, like Gartner, Sonic and IBM made different definitions of the term.

When we compare all the different ESB solutions we can define a common set of characteristics that apply to an ESB:

• Brokered Communication
  The basic function of a ESB is to send data between processes on a single or multiple computers. The brokered communication is offered by the use of a software intermediary between the sender and the receiver.
• Routing
  Based on a predefined set of criteria ESBs are capable of routing messages to subscribers
• Endpoint Metadata
  ESBs normally maintain metadata that describe the service interfaces and message schemas.
• Basic Web Services
  An ESB supports basic Web service standards like SOAP, WSDL and foundational standards like TCP/IP and XML to communicate.

A lot of venders try to position their ESB as the single solution that solves all integration needs, but an ESB product can rarely do this as it misses features like business activity monitoring and business rules.

Does Microsoft deliver an ESB? No they do not. Of course you can build an ESB with the toolset from Microsoft, but they believe in delivering a broader set of important integration requirements that go beyond the ESB. Microsoft offers message validation and transformation, BAM, Business rules management and business process orchestration & management.

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What is BPEL?

January 29, 2007   21:33

Today I had to answer some questions that involved BPEL. So what is BPEL?

BPEL stands for Business Process Execution Language. When we connect the systems of two or more organizations, it might be useful or even necessary to know something about the business process from each company.

There are “easy” ways to share business process information between Business Process Management (BPM) systems when they are created by the same vendor. For example, with BizTalk Server 2006 you can use the Trading Partner Management technology to exchange this information. However, in real life, most companies use systems from different vendors.

To allow insight in each other Business processes Microsoft, IBM and others have created the BPEL language. The language is particularly useful to describe and sharing externally visible parts of a business process. BPEL is an Orchestration language which is built entirely on Web services. Inside BizTalk it is possible to export business processes that are designed with the Orchestration Designer into BPEL.

BPEL isn’t a complete language for defining business processes. For that reason it is hard to view it as a fully mature technology, but of course it keeps evolving. A more thorough explanation of BPEL can be found here.

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