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Enterprise Service Bus
vBulletin Book Store > vBulletin books beginning with E
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Enterprise Service Bus |
Author: David Chappell
Published: 2004-06 |
List price: $39.95
Our price: $35.60
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Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: August 29th, 2008 04:53:26 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Good Book slightly before mass SOA Adoption
This is a good book on ESB's but not on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Although ESB's have become the foundation of most SOA deployments, this book was written before the majority of the market activity took place around SOA. Therefore it doesn't cover in much detail registries, repositories, governance, security and more current SOA issues. It does however provide a very good overview of ESB's.
It is interesting to note that the author has moved on from Sonic Software to Oracle and now is selling the virtues of SOA-enabling Grids or SOA Grids as the next best thing proving that SOA is about to move beyond the Enterprise and impact networks. I would expect to see a book in the near future by David on this topic.
Gary E. Smith
THE SOA NETWORK
www.soanetwork.net
 ESB/SOA Highlevel Theory in Practice & Practical Examples
This book, which was published in 2004, still remains as one of the best books in my personal collection of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), SOA and related books.
The author does a good job of introducing a new computer architecture paradigm! And this is to think of software like hardware. Like hardware, have components that are plug-and-play into a standard bus. Standard interfaces, standard input/output, etc.
I found the first three chapters as extremely useful for an overall view. Then I recommend skipping to the fold out to study symbols and icons. Then, I studied chapter 9 which is about ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) as an example that tries to help us understand the essence of ESB. I also spent time on understanding, chapters 10, 11, and 12 which give a good understanding of the Components, Integration, and Web Services. Other chapters in between, for example EAI, MOM, JMS and XML should be looked at more like the "Old paradigm". But if you are focused on ESB/SOA above chapters will give you an excellent overall architecture picture, and, a good taste of what it takes, and what different terms mean.
I also think that the author has done a good job of explaining things whith what was available then. This is an evolving and maturing technology even now.
I also tried to understand these concepts as they related to BEA WebLogic 9.2 and/or IBM WebSphere to bring more practical parallel understanding. This did help.
 Gives a high level overview of ESB
I wanted a book that gave me an clear understanding of what an ESB is, and this book did exactly that. While the figures were illustrative, I felt that more reading material could have been added. The two chapters that were useful were Chapters 1 and 11.
But like I said in my first sentence, it gave me an high level understanding of an ESB.
 Too much fluff, no substance
I found this book to provide a good introduction in the first chapter, but it was extremely wordy in describing SOA and ESB principles. The definitions were polluted with buzzwords and sales jargon to the point of being painful. It's "marketecture."
A book that provides a concise and clear definition of SOA principles is "Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices" by Dirk Krafzig, Karl Banke, Dirk Slama. While better than Enterprise Service Bus, this book also does not entirely meet the needs of a computer professional embarking on a large Enterprise software project.
I still have not found a book that provides the necessary guidance with regard to architectural principles, architectural styles, communicating an architecture effectively and evaluating/analyzing existing architectures.
Some interesting insights, but a bit too high-level for me
The book provides some interesting insights into emerging technologies, but overall is too high-level and, in the end, pretty vague on the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) architecture. The basic idea is that you should use asynchronous messaging in XML and leave all routing/aggregation/security/transformations to a special integration layer called ESB, like a product produced by author's company. This would give you more integration by configuration rather than coding, the argument goes. Author described how a lot of recent XML standards are going toward or adding async model. All in all, ESB seems to be pretty much Message Oriented Middleware (MOM), but with (somewhat inconsistent) emphasis on open on-the-wire protocol. I wish this was distilled in a sentence upfront.
So far so good. But what on-the-wire messaging protocol should we use? It appears the author is saying anything and all goes - just maybe add XML. This is where it starts being vague as if for fear to upset anybody. So, is ESB basically about just putting any XML on the wire? Not all XML is the same (just as binary content was not), and author in fact points out competing standards on XML messaging. There are a lot of decisions on top of "let's just use XML" on which the author leaves you to your own devices. He just covers all upcoming XML standards from A..Z in a few sentences each. It is the sort of "XML will save the world regardless of how it is used" approach that worries me.
At the same time, a lot of space is dedicated to JMS. The author tentatively explains that JMS is not really suitable for ESB because it does not provide an open on-the-wire protocol - only standard APIs. I am glad he covered this because this is a wide misconception. But then why JMS presented as one of nice re-usable building blocks for ESB? I think he is saying because it provides comprehensive framework for messaging. Ok. But proprietary on-the-wire format means it is not really suitable for ESB unless you find a product that uses XML transport under JMS API. The author does not explain this nor discuss how standard is that JMS-API-to-wire bridge today, so the whole JMS tie-in with ESB's supposedly open architecture was not clear to me.
As a practitioner, I also wish there were a bit more insights into how redundancy and errors are to be handled in this architecture. Also, how transactional semantics are handled end-to-end in such environment. The examples with reliable messaging are too simplistic and abstract to cover the real challenges involved. All of this may hide the extra complexity and overhead actually pushed on application with asynchronous and highly loosely coupled ESB design. Maybe the trade-offs would still favor it, but a bit more points of analysis would help to enlighten the reader.
It is interesting that the author takes on application servers and argues that they are not good for ESB infrastructure (unlike for source applications themselves). I appreciate that the author is not afraid to go against the grain if it makes for a good technical choice (same could be applied to JMS), but I wish the arguments were a bit clearer and specific. For example, the author claims that app server is not suitable for loosely coupled component deployment. I wish he explained why because obviously JEE proponents may be curious.
In the end, this book is more of an overview of Sonic ESB product deployment architecture, rather than necessarily an IT architecture. Be aware of that, but do read the book for yet another perspective. I found the book pretty easy to read - only took me an hour.
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