RE: [soa-blueprints] The Myth of ESB... is it a blueprint or a pattern

From: marchadr@wellsfargo.com [mailto:marchadr@wellsfargo.com]
Sent: 06 December 2005 17:04
To: Jones, Steve G; Bisketa@agedwards.com; soa-blueprints@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [soa-blueprints] The Myth of ESB... is it a blueprint or a pattern...

On thing I would note is that the ideal of getting "legacy" to magically be exposed through a service seems to be a bit counter intuitive.

They are legacy because they don't or are not really designed for a service.

[Jones, Steve G] Magically implies a magician… and I certainly agree that enabling legacy systems functionality to become more service oriented is hard. But this is a critical part of the challenge.

Slapping them into an ESB doesn't necessarily make them a service and there needs to be much more thought about taking "legacy" environments and turning them loose into your SOA. Granted a lot of the legacy are based on a CICS or some sort of mainframe environment which in some ways do have a notion of services. But the granularity of those services is something to evaluate and re-engineer to a certain extent.

[Jones, Steve G] Hence the reason I’m separating Integration out as a separate effort. Its aim is to put “lipstick on the pig” of the legacy environment to help it look a little more service oriented. The real work is then to do the additional effort that maps that to the business service architecture. But if you don’t do exposure of legacy in a more SOA way then its storing up problems for the future.

Also Policy in some cases can be in the infrastructure with validation of service actors to a service. A service in some sense should care to much about that unless there is functionality differences based on a policy of a client.

[Jones, Steve G] I’d say that Policy based ESBs is more about the Business Service Bus side of the equation than the integration side.

Thoughts?

Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: Jones, Steve G [mailto:steve.g.jones@capgemini.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 1:16 AM
To: Biske, Todd; Marchant, Dan R.; soa-blueprints@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [soa-blueprints] The Myth of ESB... is it a blueprint or a pattern...

SOI isn’t in SOA-RM, it aims to deal with the software side of the services and doesn’t include composition/ /orchestration or proscribe how mediation should be done.

I’ve been separating (gratuitous plug for IT Week Webinar on Wednesday) the “ESB” world into two separate elements recently both conceptually and for implementation. There is the ESB that is really an Integration Service Bus, which is all about turning your legacy systems into Services that can then play in the SOA Playground. The other one is the Business Service Bus, which is about taking the Services in the SOA Playground and adding the policy and mediation control between those services. The ISB and BSB perform distinctly different tasks, the BSB is about achieving IT/Business alignment and flexibility, the ISB is about getting the legacy into a position where it can be used as part of that alignment.

Make sense?

Steve

From: Biske, Todd [mailto:Bisketa@agedwards.com]
Sent: 06 December 2005 04:53
To: marchadr@wellsfargo.com; Jones, Steve G; soa-blueprints@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [soa-blueprints] The Myth of ESB... is it a blueprint or a pattern...

I have a couple comments on this thread. First, ESB lacks a clear definition. I'm here at the Gartner Summit in Orlando, and that fact has been very apparent. If we're going to deal with SOA Infrastructure as part of this TC (I haven't reviewed the SOA-RM stuff yet, I had presumed infrastructural patterns belonged there), I'd prefer to call it a mediation layer. That doesn't imply any particular architecture, only that there is some logical processing occuring between a consumer and a provider.

Second, I agree with Dan's comment on the realization of a blueprint, versus the actual blueprint. In either case, I think our focus should be in showing the different blueprints, the possible realizations of those blueprints, and some pros/cons.

-tb

-----Original Message-----
From: marchadr@wellsfargo.com
To: steve.g.jones@capgemini.com; soa-blueprints@lists.oasis-open.org
Sent: 12/5/05 5:40 PM
Subject: RE: [soa-blueprints] The Myth of ESB... is it a blueprint or a pattern...

In addition to this it may be a good idea to define what a bus really
should do at a practical level.
This may be a realization of a blueprint in my mind than an actual
blueprint. A bus is an enabling technology unless people think it is an
approach?

2 cents.

- Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: Jones, Steve G [mailto:steve.g.jones@capgemini.com]
Sent: Monday, December 05, 2005 3:33 PM
To: soa-blueprints@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [soa-blueprints] The Myth of ESB... is it a blueprint or a
pattern...

A question to the group

Back in the old “Enterprise Application Integration” days the vendors
pushed a model which had either a single broker in the middle, or a bus
in the middle. The common element was always that “one” thing in the
centre. We are now seeing the same thing with ESB, the concept of a
single bus (product) that rules the enterprise. With EAI one of the
biggest challenges was that product centric view of the world which led
to organisations being left with “legacy” EAI which is as much of an
issue as the applications it was meant to make easy to access (any Monk
programmers out there?).

So what my strawman is to this group (and as the Soalogic thing evolves
its quite important) is that concept of bus federation is essential to
an SOA Blueprint, you must assume that there will be multiple busses,
potentially at all levels, these may use similar technology (even
identical) but the principles of federation should be the default for a
well formed SOA. Now is this a pattern or a blueprint, and if a
blueprint where should it be considered. My viewpoint is that there
needs to be an official counterpoint to the vendor view that takes a
Lord of the Rings (one ESB to find them all and in the darkness bind
them) approach to delivery. The best ESB is the one that assumes it
isn’t the only thing around.

Steve

___________________________________________________________

Steve Jones | Capgemini

CTO, Application Development Transformation

T +44 870 906 7026| 700 7026| <http://www.capgemini.com>
www.capgemini.com

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