What is an ESB and what is it good for?

Question

At a previous job, there was lots of talk about \"Enterprise Service Bus\" (ESB). I read parts of a conceptual book about it, but never really understood how you would impl

Answer 1

Well, that depends on who you ask... Many would say it's a piece of "Middleware" that connects various pieces of "business logic" together to take the coding out of messaging between these modules. I think that's a general enough definition, but I'm sure you've already gotten there via Wikipedia and whatnot.

Those who would have the great ESB save the world see it as it's most commonly presented, a hub for doing everything. Most ESB implementations effort to encapsulate all repetitive tasks we see in business software. That means most ESBs take care of data transfer, security, logging, protocol translation, event systems, api exposure via web services, etc.

I think that's as clear as I can be... Hope that helps.