Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and it Role in the Realization of SOA

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and it Role in the Realization of SOA

Introduction

The SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) can simply be defined as the style adapted of the software architecture for the designing and development of software in the form of various interoperable services. All these services have specific business functionalities, which are built as various software components. It is important to note that all these services can be reutilized for various purposes and functions. Hence, the multipurpose functionality of SOA cannot be denied. However, it is the model of software architecture, known as ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) that is responsible for the designing and implementation of the communication and interaction amongst the mutually communicating software applications within the service-oriented architecture (Bell, 2008).

Discussion

It is evident that the Enterprise Service Bus plays a central role in the running and management of the many services offered by the Service-Oriented Architecture.

The ESB Role within SOA

The proper implementation of SOA requires service interfaces to be defined in accordance with the SOA doctrines, besides the infrastructure that allows the client code to invoke various services in a pattern independent of the location of services and the protocols involved for communication. Such service substitution and routing are amongst the unlimited capabilities the ESB has to offer.

The fundamental role of ESB is to support the service interaction ability, and offers integrated messaging, communication, and event infrastructure to manage them. Therefore, it combines all the major and currently used enterprise integration patterns into one single entity. The ESB, hence, offers an infrastructure for a SOA that fulfill the requirements of an enterprise, to provide appropriate service manageability and levels and, to function in environment that is heterogeneous (www.ibm.com) (Part 1).

The ESB's Fundamental Structure

ESB supports a centralize control of the configuration, such as naming of the services, routing of the service, interactions between services and so forth. Therefore, ESP deploys a simple and centralized infrastructure that is more evenly distributive and sophisticatedly functional.

The overall ESB utilized SOA architecture that contains interfaces and adaptors to take requests from the clients to the central ESB and take the messages of the services providers back to the clients. However, the more important component in the ESB-SOA includes; a service routing directory for routing the service requests; separate business service directory that is a time-design service catalog for achieving the reuse ...