Robert Davies

Over the last several years, integration technology has been growing by leaps and bounds. The XML/REST/Web Services/SOA revolution has driven engineers and software firms to create an abundance of protocols, adaptors, transports, containers, standards, best practices...you name it. The bits and bytes that are now available are undeniably sophisticated, diverse, and capable of almost anything, but many of the packages are built from the technology up and leave the job of how to use the capabilities effectively as an exercise for the reader. Today, many readers have completed many such exercises. There is a wealth of experience and thousands of successful projects out there that have led to the definition of many infrastructure design patterns that help developers cut to the chase when it comes to integration. One set of design patterns that has gained traction in the... (more)

ESB Technology & Innovation

Called to larger tasks, messaging technology is now in a phase of evolution. A mixed message model is needed to combine the best of Web services and traditional asynchronous message delivery to provide the flexibility required for today's real-time enterprise. Traditional message-queuing middleware will soon be replaced by enterprise service bus (ESB) technology - taking messaging to the next level. The new ESB backbone, which will enable the next generation of integration and application platform products, will bring radical improvements to the software infrastructure of most e... (more)

Pick Your Enterprise Service Bus with Care!

The latest hype technology has numerous software vendors scrambling to become buzzword compliant. Analyst groups from Gartner to IDC hail the enterprise service bus (ESB) as the revolutionary technology that will transform middleware due to the vast benefits of adopting vendor-independent standards-based architectures. According to Gartner, ESBs will replace traditional middleware by 2007. So far, however, this "revolution" has seen only a few sparks. Though just a handful of users have begun deploying ESBs, reports from early adopters imply that the advantages of putting ESBs i... (more)

SOA + EDA = Open Source ESB: ServiceMix(*)

Today's enterprise applications are distributed by design. For applications to interact with one another over networks optimally, they require Service Oriented and Event Driven Architectures made up of loosely federated business resources, that interact by exchanging requests (for data delivery and integration, as well as for services) and that can handle streams of diverse business processes in real-time. To support large-scale, enterprise integration, organizations need to adopt strategies that rationalize the infrastructure for integration based on the requirements of business... (more)

Open Source Integration and Messaging in the Cloud

The cloud: few topics are as frequently discussed among information technology (IT) professionals. But why? Internet hosted applications and services certainly aren't a new concept. In fact, application service providers began delivering functionality via the Web more than a decade ago, and even Software-as-a-Service, considered a revolutionary way to deliver software just a few years ago, is now commonplace. Nor is the cloud necessarily a new story or concept. One can argue it is not unlike the mainframe computing environment of years past - one in which resources are provision... (more)