Tag Archives: ESB

What is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)?

If you all too often hear the term “Enterprise Service Bus” or ESB (we all love those acronyms, right?) but never really knew what it’s all about, you should check out this recording by Marc Richards. He gives a great overview what an ESB is at its core. Rather long but worth every minute!

What I particularly like about this presentation is that it’s completely neutral with regard to technology or vendor. Instead Marc explains what an ESB is supposed to do, but not how this is implemented. The term ESB (at its very core) is a concept and neither a technology nor a product can claim that they are the only rightful incarnation. So statements like “An ESB must be BPEL-based” only demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding. You could also have an ESB based on CORBA running on a mainframe. Well, this will probably not happen too often but it underlines the point.