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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My first experiences with BizTalk

January 21, 2007   14:56

Here is a one-time post with information about how I started with BizTalk to get the information on this blog up-to-date.

I wasn’t really aware of Microsoft BizTalk until July 2006. At the integration unit of Ordina MES I was working as C# .NET developer. During my holiday when I was sailing my manager phoned with the question if I wanted to join the introduction course to BizTalk 2006 because there was still a free seat.

The hands-on training was given in August by U2U Training Services at our own office. It contained an introduction to BizTalk Server 2006, schemas, maps, messaging, orchestrations and transactions. BizTalk fitted my personal interests and I was quite impressed by the possibilities. At that moment I decided to join our BizTalk group.

One of the intentions of the group was to get BizTalk 2006 Server certified. With 4 of our team members we focused on learning the theory for the 70-235 “TS: Developing Business Process and Integration Solutions Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006” exam. There wasn’t much training material available yet, so we used the just appeared books “BizTalk 2006 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach” and “Pro BizTalk 2006“. We all managed to pass the exam in one time. The exam was a little bit disappointing as we all have to feeling that we got exactly the same questions. Microsoft should do better to get a bit more diversity in their exam questions.

Right now I’m learning more and more about BizTalk by reading articles and doing practices. To keep my information centralized I started this blog. Because I’m particularly interested in user-interfaces, I will focus myself on the user aspects of BizTalk like BAM and Sharepoint 2007 integration. Besides that I’m currently working on information about Microsoft ESB Guidance.

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