Open source Mule takes the "donkey work" out of ESB (IT Manager's Journal)

Open source Mule takes the "donkey work" out of ESB (IT Manager's Journal)

Posted Apr 13, 2007 15:31 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: Open source Mule takes the "donkey work" out of ESB (IT Manager's Journal) by drag
Parent article: Open source Mule takes the "donkey work" out of ESB (IT Manager's Journal)

A real ESB is much more than a notification network.
Common W3C wisdom is to have a dumb network and smart endpoints

In an entreprise context you have a pile of endpoints which are not going smarter any time soon (legacy systems, of-the-shelf systems you can't modify, critical don't-you-dare-touch-it systems, in-house stuff that does FTP because it has "File transfer" in its name, etc). They all exchange data. It's a costly mess (as in spaguetti + local fiefdoms + heterogeneous tech)

So you put the smartness where you can, in the network. You tell every endpoint to plug its data interfaces (imports, exports, messages, whatever) in a smart hub (or a serie of chained smart hubs). When you need to reconfigure your information system you only need to reprogram this hub (and not locate all the entities needed to change every single endpoint)

The old craze was EAI (I try to speak every possible protocol but I'm real bad at changing flow logic). The new one is ESB (I'm real good at flow logic but don't ask me to speak your weird protocol, I only talk HTTP, SOAP & JMS)

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