The Seven Points of an ESB

When discussing an ESB, many people keep it simple, sticking to the generalities of SOA and sharing services to build composite business applications.  Certainly, these are incredibly important benefits of an ESB but what do these dicussions really mean at the architecture level? 

Another word for integration when it comes to ESBs is mediation.  After all, that is truly what an ESB does - mediates the differences between application components (services) that were not intended to work together.  So then, in context of mediation, how should an ESB be examined?  Here at Progress, we view there to be seven points of mediation that serve as a set of key principles that apply to any integration infrastructure. They are critical because adherence to all seven is necessary to achieve the ultimate goals of SOA: reuse and agility.

Any one point that is not mediated becomes a point of brittleness. Put another way, interoperability needs to be tested along seven key points, which, briefly, are:

7 POINTS OF MEDIATION
Transport/Protocol
Location/Destination
Semantic/Format
Sequencing
Error Recovery
Quality of Service/Quality of Protection
Interaction Model

To help examine these points in-depth Progress has created a series of technical briefs (white papers).  These papers use the 'Seven Points of Mediation' as a way of describing how an ESB is, in fact, a comprehensive infrastructure onto which services can delegate these points. The overriding idea is that if a service delegates each and every point of mediation, it becomes more reusable in more contexts. These papers explain how Sonic ESB enables a service to free itself of these considerations, ultimately, so that it can provide the agility that SOA promises.

Be sure to watch the Transport, Location, and Semantics podcast and download the technical brief to learn more about the Seven Points of Mediation and the importance of each in relation to supporting a truly agile and responsive business application infrastructure.

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Comments

[Pam Gazley]

One of our most popular podcasts was Hub's 7 Points of Mediation. If anyone is interested in also listening to that, here's the link:
http://www.veotag.com/player/?pid=352f4ecd-9c3d-4e87-8ac8-8926607ddca9&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=460&width=456