<<I guess the acronym "ESB" won't stand for "Enterprise Standards Bus"
anytime soon.
Neal Ford just published this piece
<http://memeagora.blogspot.com/2009/01/standards-based-vs-standardized-soa.html>
on the ongoing travails of the enterprise service bus, making this
interesting observation: that ESBs tend to be "'standards-based,' but
not 'standardized.'
An important distinction, he points out, because ESBs tend to be "held
together by highly proprietary glue" from their respective vendors.
Contrast this with the standardization we see in Web servers, such as
Java EE or J2EE, as imposed by Sun. As Neal points out, the vendors'
proprietary glue "shows up in the administration tools, the way their
BPEL designer works (along with their custom BPEL meta-data), how you
configure the thing, how you handle routing, etc. The list goes on and on."
"Even the open source offerings in the ESB space suffer a little from
this," he adds.
What's the motivation for vendors to keep their own proprietary hooks in
ESBs? They don't want this lucrative market segment to get commoditized
the way J2EE did a few years back:
"The last thing the vendors want is to see their (crazy money
making) babies turned into commodity software again. They'll make
noise about creating a true standard, but it won't happen. They want
to be more like the database vendors, not the application server
vendors."
It looks like the challenge for some time to come will continue to be
figuring out the best the way to federate these mediation engines that
are springing up across their enterprises into a true service oriented
architecture.>>
*You can read this at:
*
*http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=1255
*
*Gervas*
