The "ESH"

For people less acquainted with the Integration world, the word Bus in "Enterprise Service Bus" causes many to believe that an ESB is something distributed. But on the contrary, 95% of ESB deployments are hub and spoke. One or a few servers located centrally through which all the messages pass. Distributed execution of integration logic remains the exception.

Therefore, we should maybe introduce the "ESH", the Enterprise Service Hub?

Notes:

1. Older integration solutions often had their adapters running on the same servers as the back-end applications or database, so away from the central message broker. But nowadays, also all the adapter logic is put in to the central hub.
2. Obviously, every ESB can deployed in a distributed manner, interconnected by some messaging solution. But that's definitely not the standard approach.
3. Why is integration logic put centrally? One justification is to avoid disturbing the servers on which the back-end applications are running.
4. Maybe lighter-weight, open source ESB's will make distributed execution of integration logic more popular. E.g. with such open source ESB's deployed along with a J2EE application.
   

Devoxx 2008

Last week I was at the Devoxx conference in Antwerp. Just 20 kms from where I live and the city where I grew up. Being one of the steering members, I gave a hand here and there and was involved in selecting the talks, in particular regarding SOA and security. I really enjoyed the conference, some of my highlights:

• Logo: simply love it
• Venue: the Metropolis movie theater is a really nice location and the the logo on these big screens looks soooo nice; the seats are just a bit too comfortable: my eyes seem to close automagically
• The team: I really had fun times this week with Frederik, Sven, Valérie, Jo, Stijn, Stephan, Gert, Dan, ...
• DataPower: the IBM partner talk had obviously some commercial aspect, but some insight on XML threats and the idea of an 'ESB in hardware' were simply awesome
• Paul Fremantle's talk on complex event processing and the conversation afterwards, e.g. on AMQP and the "unreliability of WS-ReliableMessaging" (Paul is the WS-RX spec lead)
• XSLT 2.0 by Doug Tidwell: XML remains relevant and Dough can bring his story in such a funny way (thanks Robin for arranging this)
  
• REST talk by Stefan Tilkov: although I have a more biased view on the REST and WS-* story, Stefan brings his message so well

And so much more: JAX-RS talk, OpenMQ, XML Persistence by John Davies and meeting Mr Ivar Jacobson at the Devoxx reception desk.

Already looking forward to Devoxx 2009! And thinking about new topics and speakers in the SOA/security area for 2009: Smooks, more cloud computing, new ESB features, BPM and BPEL (BPELScript?), design- and runtime governance of services, Master Data Management, new XML stuff, claims based security, trusted computing, ... Any suggestions?