ESB: The SOA buzzword by Lookman SANNI and Younes ABOUELFAID
Globalization enforces nowadays companies to enable intra and inter-organizational process and to increase efficiency at low cost in order to stay competitive. In such a context of business integration, reusability and homogeneity are to be promoted in order to make services widely available in a real world IT environment through what’s called Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
Most of vendors today propose proprietary software that covers every nuance of business integration requirements. This results in some outfit and overall locked enterprise software, exemplifying redundancy, complexity and resistance to extensibility. At the other hand, open source solutions lack of suitability to production environment as they are not provided as much industry support as they should.
As a matter of fact, software development industry started investing less and less in rigid and complex components where most of it is not used and more in light weighted and flexible ones. A new generation of software solution has then emerged under the term: “Lean Software”. Lean software is a ‘Just in Time’ solution for today and tomorrow needs. In other words, lean software is easily consumable and does not divert costly resource hours to be prepared for usage itself.
Talking specifically about ESB, it’s now about selecting a lightweight ESB for SOA adoption able to overcome the quoted limitations with minimal compromises. Such ESB should be configurable enough in order to make available only the right mix of needed functionality, to provide extensibility and scalability possibility and to provide necessary support while still being easy to use.
The Glassfish ESB provides such core ESB functionality opportunity in lean SOA deployment project. It is simple to be implemented and used. An essential set of adapters and support for common business integration standards facilitate rapid SOA deployment which makes developers concentrate more on integrating applications instead of spending costly resource hours on reworking the middleware to prepare the foundation for the actual project. Part of the Sun Glassfish portfolio, it combines technology from existing mature open source projects such as the Sun Glassfish Enterprise Server Runtime, the Netbeans Integrated Development Environment and new components, engines, adapters and standards from the OpenESB community.
Tailored to all profiles from programmers and architects to project managers, Glassfish ESB ensures cost reduction, efficiency increase and so resultant time-to-market reduction. Glassfish ESB can be highly scalable. For initial integration only the necessary functionalities can be used to create a department-level application; additional functionalities can be added later, based on the evolving needs. Glassfish ESB is also fully supported by Sun, with support subscription; testing; documentation; certification; training; and indemnification which is customized based on the customer’s level of usage.
The Glassfish ESB’s efficiency is not to be proven anymore as it has been implemented in several industry cases. The United States Department of Health and Human services (HHS) for instance has chosen it for connecting the federal government agencies and health information exchanges accross the country. Glassfish ESB’s cross platform compatibility and major footprint in health information exchange have been influencing in this choice.