Recently I have been looking in more depth at the benefits of using an Enterprise Service Bus, ESB, within applications. I'm fine with the Service Bus part of this but have never really liked the word Enterprise and that immediately conjures up some picture that it only has a place in the large corporate enterprises. But that isn’t true and yesterday I came across this blog entry, which is along similar lines.

There is huge value in having a messaging bus like an ESB, in at Equisoft in 1992 we had our own message bus system on a windows environment for an application and it worked extremely well. Today off course the ESB’s are much more advanced than what we had back then, with transformations, dozens of adapters etc.

However one of the biggest issues that keeps coming up each time ESB’s are discussed with non-believers is performance. How can an ESB process XML quick enough for real time systems, it will never happen, is the usual response. As with everything though there are so many factors involved in this, no simple yes or no. over the next few weeks this is something I need to find out more about and will be doing some prototyping to see what we can get out of an ESB.

Initially I will use MuleSource as a test bed and then go from there. Oracle have a ESB built in as do many of the large Application Server vendors. But one of the others ones I would like to try is SonicMQ.