The value of the enterprise service bus is well understood in the enterprise integration practice and yet the very flexibility offered by such a bus can in itself lead to a bewildering selection of choices when planning and building an integration architecture (see Related topics). This can be further compounded by the range of capabilities provided by the middleware products which support such architectural patterns. Moreover these products typically support not just the very specific notion of a service bus as an infrastructure for connecting and virtualizing services in the context of a broader service oriented architecture but the more general notion of the service bus as a connectivity infrastructure for services in a very generic sense. In this article we will use the term service bus (or enterprise service bus) in the much broader sense.
The value of the enterprise service bus is well understood in the enterprise integration practice and yet the very flexibility offered by such a bus can in itself lead to a bewildering selection of choices when planning and building an integration architecture (see Related topics). This can be further compounded by the range of capabilities provided by the middleware products which support such architectural patterns. Moreover these products typically support not just the very specific notion of a service bus as an infrastructure for connecting and virtualizing services in the context of a broader service oriented architecture but the more general notion of the service bus as a connectivity infrastructure for services in a very generic sense. In this article we will use the term service bus (or enterprise service bus) in the much broader sense.