Enterprise Service Bus Terminology

Question

Can anyone explain at a beginner-intermediate level the terminology of "bus", "transport" and "endpoint" in the context of an enterprise service bus? I'm a C# developer with a few years experience now, but only just starting working with an ESB.

It seems that the "bus" is effectively a queue to which you can send and receive messages. I'm fine with that. However I'm working on some existing code using NServiceBus and I think if I grokked the "endpoint" and "transport" terminology I'd make a massive leap forward in my understanding.

Answer 1

Let me try to clarify those terms to you:

Bus in context of ESB architecture should not be considered as simple queue for message dispatching. To allow integration of different services, ESB provides much more. Important additional functionalities of ESB:

• Routing. Messages can be routed to different services, depending on message content or endpoint specification.
• Message Transformations/Mediations between different formats
• Transport protocol conversion. ESB should be able to seamlessly integrate applications that use different transport protocols (JMS, HTTP/S, pure TCP, etc.)
• Message enhancement. Messages can be enriched with missing data before further processing.
• Security
• Management and Monitoring

Those functionalites are provided by services that operate within ESB. Services connect to each other via endpoints - uniform, unique "addresses". Messages dispatched between endpoints are using unified transport (method/protocol that encapsulates message's payload). Application that natively use different transport, need to connect to ESB via suitable adapter - service that will provide necessary transport conversion. This way applications that use ESB are decoupled from each other and don't need to provide conversions themselves.

Of course, those are only very brief descriptions of terms. Remember, Enterprise Service Bus is only catch-term for specific kind of architecture (or concept), but it is not standardized in any way. So specific implementations can be very different from each other. If you are interested in standardized ESB, you can take a look at JBI (Java Bussiness Integration). There are several open-source implementations of JBI avalable, among them Apache ServiceMix, Mule, OpenESB. Very good introduction to ESB technologies is presented in "Open Source ESBs in Action" book published by Manning.

Answer 2

I would recommend looking at resources related to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), which revolves around the ESB and various models and patterns used to integrate solutions. Think of it is a GoF for ESB architectures:

http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/

and

http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/toc.html

All of these patterns would give you an idea of what people use ESB's to achieve and the patterns are useful for providing common pitfalls of do-it-yourself ESB integration. I've learned an immense amount through that book and through people that source from it.