ESBs Enable Real-World SOA
Bobby Woolf on Why the ESB is a fundamental part of SOA, which is what we believe as well obviously, in contrast to Steve Vinoski, who now has sworn them off for the whole RESTafarian thing. You know, I have a lot of respect for Steve as the legend he is, but I can't understand him here. SOA is a comprehensive lifecycle with identifying reusable business processes as reusable autonomous services. To me, WS-* and REST are totally unimportant to that; they are just architectural styles for the delivery of said services and that's it: they don't address most of the SOA lifecycle. I could really care less if someone chose to use REST but that isn't going to be the answer to the very real problems that enterprises face (like REST is going to solve the EAI nightmares) and SOA addresses when the focus is on business, not geeky REST vs. WS-*.
I like what Chuck Adams had to say in the comments:
So the answer to ESB and application integration is … REST?
So basically, the existing knowledge base and, oh, salesforce.com should just be completely rewritten as a REST app? I mean, is there even a single case study where this fantastigasmic REST panacea has ever addressed a problem beyond the simple CRUD form apps that one might slap together with Rails?
Yah right. People like the REST people think that integration is not that big of a deal, and that a few interconnections can make the world work. The reality is that services require care and feeding (governance), and mediation, and transformation, are almost universally required because there is no single standard for interoperability, and that’s fine. An ESB SHOULD be something you plug your service into and all the stuff under the covers is magic (hey, isn’t that what the .net framework largely does,)
Back to the ESB: AS Bobby says, "Like I've now gotten in the habit of telling people: SOA puts the S in ESB." And as we say, Neuron ESB: the WCF/SOA Enabler. You can stand up a bunch of free-standing WCF or REST services and then what? You can spend months with WCF building the service management, service catalog and registry, reliability, health monitoring, centralized versioning, etc or you could be up and going with Neuron in a few hours with your WSDLs sucked in and have all the benefits.