Enterprise Services Bus ---1 Overview & Introduction

Author: Harold Wang

http://blog.csdn.net/hero7935

Integration is making a comeback—perhaps it never even left. In this book you'll be introduced to the next generation of integration, called Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). ESB is really exciting in that it introduces battle-ready integration principles in a new way using open standards, messaging, and loosely coupled Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles.

The ESB concept is a new approach to integration that can provide the underpinnings for a loosely coupled, highly distributed integration network that can scale beyond the limits of a hub-and-spoke EAI broker. An ESB is a standards-based integration platform that combines messaging, web services, data transformation, and intelligent routing to reliably connect and coordinate the interaction of significant numbers of diverse applications across extended enterprises with transactional integrity.

1.1 SOA in an Event-Driven Enterprise

An ESB provides the implementation backbone for an SOA. That is, it provides a loosely coupled, event-driven SOA with a highly distributed universe of named routing destinations across a multiprotocol message bus. Applications (and integration components) in the ESB are abstractly decoupled from each other, and connect together through the bus as logical endpoints that are exposed as event-driven services.

Service components in an SOA expose coarse-grained interfaces with the purpose of sharing data asynchronously between applications.s

1.2 A New Approach to Pervasive Integration

In an ESB, applications and event-driven services are tied together in an SOA in a loosely coupled fashion. This allows them to operate independently from one another while still providing value to a broader business function.

An ESB provides a highly distributed approach to integration, with unique capabilities that allow individual departments or business units to build out their integration projects in incremental, digestible chunks. Using an ESB, departments and business units can continue to maintain their own local control and autonomy in individual integration projects, while still being able to connect each integration project into a larger, more global integration network or grid.

Author: Harold Wang

http://blog.csdn.net/hero7935

1.3 SOA for Web Services, Available Today

The web services standards are trending in the right direction, but remain incomplete with respect to the enterprise-grade capabilities such as security, reliability, transaction management, and business process orchestration.

The ESB is based on today's established standards in these areas, and has real implementations that are already being deployed across a number of industries. The ESB is quite capable of keeping in step with the ongoing evolution of the web-services equivalents of these capabilities as they mature.

1.4 Conventional Inegration Approaches

An ESB applies web services and other complementary standards by combining them with technology concepts and best practices learned from EAI brokers. However, an ESB is more than simply a web-services veneer on top of the same old EAI hub.

Traditional EAI brokers, which include those that are built upon application servers, use a hub-and-spoke architecture.A hub-and-spoke architecture has the benefit of centralized functions, such as management of routing logic and business rules, but does not scale well across departmental or business unit boundaries.

Application servers can interoperate through standard protocols, yet they link things together in a tightly coupled fashion, and intertwine the integration logic and application logic together.

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) provides the ability to connect applications in a loosely coupled, asynchronous fashion.However, MOM by itself requires low-level coding in an application. Using a traditional MOM, along with custom coding techniques, can get you a long way toward a distributed integration solution. However, without a higher level of abstraction of the routing logic, this approach also suffers from having integration logic hard-wired and intertwined with the application logic. Depending on the MOM being used, even the distributed characteristic might be limited because some traditional MOM infrastructure is not capable of spanning physical network boundaries very well.

An ESB architecture forms an interconnected grid of messaging hubs and integration services, with the intelligence and functionality of the integration network distributed throughout.

1.5 Requirements Driven by IT Needs

A key characteristic of an ESB is to provide the underpinnings to support the needs of distributed, loosely coupled business units and business partners automating supply chains.

IT professionals had been disappointed by some previous technology trends such as CORBA and EAI. CORBA had the right idea with SOA, but turned out to be too complex to implement and maintain due to its reliance on tightly coupled interfaces between applications and services. EAI also suffered from steep learning curves and expensive barriers to entry on individual projects.What was really needed was a simple approach to SOA, with an architecture that could be adapted to suit the general needs of any integration effort, large or small. In addition, there needed to be a durable architecture that was capable of withstanding evolutions in protocols, interface technology, and even process modeling trends. The ESB concept was created to address all these needs.

1.6 Industry Traction

    A new form of enterprise service bus (ESB) infrastructure—combining message-oriented middleware, web services, transformation and routing intelligence—will be running in the majority of enterprises by 2005.These high-function, low-cost ESBs are well suited to be the backbone for service-oriented architectures and the enterprise nervous system.   ----------Gartner Inc. Analyst R.Schulte

Those four pillars—MOM, web services, transformation, and routing intelligence—represent the foundation of any good ESB.To qualify as an ESB, both a distributed message bus and distributed integration capabilities need to exist.

Author: Harold Wang

http://blog.csdn.net/hero7935

1.7 Characteristics of an ESB

---Pervasiveness

---Standards-Based Integration

Standards-based integration is a fundamental concept of an ESB.

---Highly Distributed Integration and Selective Deployment

The ESB draws from traditional EAI broker functionality in that it provides integration services such as business process orchestration and routing of data, data transformation, and adapters to applications. However, integration brokers are usually highly centralized and monolithic in nature. The ESB provides these integration capabilities as individual services that can work together in a highly distributed fashion, and can be scaled independently from one another.

---Distributed Data Transformation

Data transformation is inherently part of the bus in an ESB deployment. Transformation services that are specialized for the needs of individual applications plugged into the bus can be located anywhere and accessible from anywhere on the bus. Because the data transformation is such an integral part of the ESB itself, an ESB can be thought of as solving the impedance mismatch between applications.

---Extensibility Through Layered Services

---Event-Driven SOA

---Process Flow

An ESB's process flow capabilities range from simple sequences of finite steps to sophisticated business process orchestration with parallel process execution paths using conditional splits and joins. These can be controlled by simple message metadata or through the use of an orchestration language such as BPEL4WS.

The process flow capabilities of the ESB make it possible to define business processes that are local to an individual department or business unit, and that can also coexist within a larger integration network. This is something a hub-and-spoke integration broker or a BPM tool can't do very well on its own.

---Security and Reliability

---Autonomous but Federated Environment

One of the biggest problems associated with extending the reach of integration beyond the departmental level is the issue of local autonomy versus centralized control.

---Remote Configuration and Management

---XML as the "Native" Datatype of the ESB

---Real-Time Throughput of Business Data

---Operational Awareness

Author: Harold Wang

http://blog.csdn.net/hero7935

Operational awareness refers to the ability of a business analyst to gain insight into the state and health of business operations.An infrastructure that allows the timely tracking and reporting of data as it flows across an organization in the form of business messages in a business process is an invaluable tool in helping to achieve operational awareness. A separate category of products known as Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) has emerged to address the many issues of operational awareness.

---Incremental Adoption

One of the primary differentiating qualities of an ESB is its ability to allow incremental adoption, as opposed to being an all-or-nothing proposition.

1.9 Summary

In summary, an ESB has the following characteristics:

 

Pervasiveness.

An ESB can be adapted to suit the needs of general-purpose integration projects across a variety of integration situations. It is capable of building out integration projects that can span an entire organization and its business partners.

 

Highly distributed, event-driven SOA.

Loosely coupled integration components can be deployed on the bus across widely distributed geographic deployment topologies, yet are accessible as shared services from anywhere on the bus.

 

Selective deployment of integration components.

Adapters, distributed data transformation services, and content-based routing services can be selectively deployed when and where they are needed, and can be independently scaled.

 

Security and reliability.

All components that communicate through the bus can take advantage of reliable messaging, transactional integrity, and secure authenticated communications.

 

Orchestration and process flow.

An ESB allows data to flow across any applications and services that are plugged into the bus, whether local or remote.

 

Autonomous yet federated managed environment.

An ESB supports local autonomy at a departmental and business unit level, and is still able to integrate in a larger managed integration environment.

 

Incremental adoption. An ESB can be used for small projects.

Each individual project can build into a much larger integration network, which can be remotely managed from anywhere on the bus.

Author: Harold Wang

http://blog.csdn.net/hero7935

 

XML support.

An ESB can take advantage of XML as its "native" datatype.

 

Real-time insight.

An ESB provides the underpinnings to enable real-time insight into live business data. BAM enablement is built right into the ESB fabric.

Author: Harold Wang

http://blog.csdn.net/hero7935