The enterprise service bus--a ride you shouldn't miss

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Misunderstanding?

The ESB or the Info-Bus or the "Data Layer" isn't something that most applications actually understand and can talk to natively.

The idea and promise behind such a bus layer is that you can allow systems to "cooperate" without realizing it. It usually takes the efforts of experts in talking with each individual system and another person who creates the web services and application server that acts as the coordinating layer.

Example: An integrated shipping system.
A typical company will already have a legacy ERP system in place be it JDE, SAP, or something else.

They may also have a system (say a PDM system) in place with information about the products that they're shipping.

Finally, they want to generate BoM's and transfer this information to an external shipping company that will handle the actual shipment.

The shipping company provides a way to electronically generate orders and to track the shipments.

So now you take your JDE/SAP experts and figure out what information you need to get out of your ERP system for the BoM. You also take your expert in the PDM system to get the information that you need out of that system as well.

Now you need to provide a new UI for the process of packing up orders and selecting the shipper to use. So you get your web application expert to do this part and also to expose the web services that your ERP and PDM experts will send their data to and from.

After that you have to talk to the web services exposed by the shipper to place your orders, track, and retrieve billing information too.

Now when this is all completed you have a great new streamlined capability in your business and it will probably be worth all the effort. The thing is that you must be very careful to not understate the effort required to get to this point.

All in all, the technologies for application integration are improving rapidly and the possibilities are quite good but there's still a lot of plumbing that needs to be done.

Posted by: Robert Crocker   Posted on: 07/27/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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