Hi Joe,
I've read the Sonic white paper (and several of
their white papers in the past). They [Sonic] will continue to
insist that they invented the first ESB, or at least were the first
to coin the term; and so will Fiorano, and IONA, etc., etc. I
attended the last several Enterprise Architect Summit conferences and
Chappell and van Huizen from Sonic always claim they invented the ESB; they
make a point of it. And then you'd actually get the Fiorano CTO up on
the same stage we these guys and claim that they [Fiorano] created the first
ESB. My point is to approach these guys with caution and try to
remain steadfast in seeing through the marketing hype.
I don't think we will want to include a
definition for ESB in our SOA-RM because although ESB is not a product, it is
an architectural best practice for implementing a SOA and thus better suited
for an architectural blueprints or reference architecture effort.
Incidentally, implementing an ESB requires an integrated set of middleware
services (i.e., technology) so again, out of our scope. It is important
to note, however, that the ESB concept is intended to support multiple
architecture styles, e.g., SOAs, message-driven architectures, and
event-driven architectures.
So in summary, I would not "sign-up" for any
recommended "RM" or "standard lexicon" or whatever a specific middleware
vendor wishes to push, including Sonic. They have a fine offering in
this space but again, I think our job (and I know you agree) is to remain
vendor-neutral. Frankly, after reading their white papers, they are much
more focused on ESB architecture than a creating a true RM. You
can see that they even refer to the W3C's WS Arch WG definition of SOA
rather than creating their own definition for SOA.
V/R, Jeff E.