Microsoft’s take on Enterprise Service bus(ESB)

Like Service oriented architecture(SOA), Business process Management(BPM) ; Enterprise Service Bus(ESB) is another used, re-used and over-used phrase. Many companies defined this ESB in ways to support the new versions of their products.

Here are some of the contrasting definitions:

"A Web-services-capable infrastructure that supports intelligently directed communication and mediated relationships among loosely coupled and decoupled biz components." –Gartner Group

"The ESB label simply implies that a product is some type of integration middleware product that supports both MOM and Web services protocols." –Burton Group

"A standards-based integration backbone, combining messaging, Web services, transformation, and intelligent routing." –Sonic Software

"An enterprise platform that implements standardized interfaces for communication, connectivity, transformation, and security." –Fiorano Software

"To put it bluntly: If you have WebSphere MQ and other WebSphere brokers and integration servers, you have an ESB." –Bob Sutor, IBM

"The Enterprise Service Bus is a uniform service integration architecture of infrastructure services that provides consistent support to business services across a defined ecosystem. The ESB is implemented as a service oriented architecture using Web Service interfaces."
–CBDI

Microsoft was indifferent to the newly coined (not any more) phrase for some time, and kept working and improving it’s existing “servers and frameworks”. But recently it decided to take this bus before it misses it. (Joking) Per Microsoft, a combination of it’s BizTalk Server 2006 and .NET 3.0 framework( Windows Communication Framework to be more specific) provide a value which surpass the features provided by different vendor implementations of Enterprise Service Bus.

The following is a quote from the Microsoft ESB Guideline documentation:

"Microsoft ESB Guideline, contains architectural guidance, patterns and practices, and BizTalk Server and .NET components that enable Microsoft partners to build large and small-scale ESB solutions on Microsoft Application platform.

Microsoft ESB Guidance consists of a number of BizTalk projects including:

· ESB Core Engine
· ESB Core Services (dynamic transformation, dynamic routing, dynamic endpoint resolution)
· ESB Portal framework
· Exception Handling framework
· ESB Client application
· Namespace Resolution pipeline component
· JMS (Java Message Service) Interop pipeline component

Microsoft ESB Guidance also provides developers with a set of frequently encountered ESB use cases and sample scenarios that are maintained within the ESB Client application and can be executed with a dynamic set of parameters to demonstrate the functionality of the ESB Core Engine, the Core Services, the ESB Management Portal, and the pipeline components. Built using a modular architecture, many of the Microsoft ESB Guidance components can be deployed as stand-alone building blocks, providing ESB developers with the flexibility to customize and extend the standard reference implementation to match their specific SOI requirements."