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What is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)?

An enterprise service bus (ESB) consists of a software architecture construct which provides fundamental services for complex architectures via an event-driven and standards-based messaging-engine (the bus).
Source: Wikipedia

The general idea of an Enteprise Service Bus is to provide a full-featured platform answering integration, routing, transformation and exchanges in a flexible, interoperable and resilient way.
ESB are also a solution of choice for adoption of modern infrastructure, based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

From EAI to ESB

The notion of enterprise service bus was born several years ago, as a renewal of Entreprise Applications Integration (EAI) solutions.
The Enterprise Applications Integration encompasses all middleware products, aiming for a better communication between one's applications, thus sparing costly point-to-point dedicated interfaces, and/or allowing better adequation of one's IS to enterprise organisation.
Traditionally, such solutions were proprietary ones. In the recent years, several factors revealed the need for a new integration model: great increase in entreprise use of business softwares, boom of internet exchanges with clients/partners/administration, lack of interoperability between concurrent EAI solutions...
Due to all of this, a new wave of products emerged: the Enterprise Services Bus.

ESB Technology Overview

An Enterprise Service Bus keeps the same core concept as traditional solutions, but brings major assets:

• standard integration interface: using a standard pivot format, such as XML;
• standard communication protocols;
• message routing;
• data transformation;
• services exposure for external exchanges.

ESB Uses

As a modern entreprise applications integration solution, an ESB can prove useful in most typical companies issues:

• connecting heterogeneous applications to allow information exchange;
• facilitating data exchange by use of a common data format;
• providing data transformation features;
• ensuring charge load balancing;
• realizing a Service Oriented Architecture for added system agility.

As a innovative, best-of-breed solution, and as an open source software suite, Petals Platform features all of this and more.

Resources

Read more about ESBs on Wikipedia