Enterprise Service Bus: Theory in Practice [With Quick-Ref Card]

Chappell gives you a solid appreciation for the essence of SOA - a great starter!

David Chappell invented the term ESB. Different people use the word ESB to denote different concepts. Chappell's book provides a clear explanation about his definition of the term ESB, which makes it a must-read for anybody involved in ESBs. The book is clearly written, and provides a good overview of all the characteristics of an ESB, albeit strongly biased towards JMS. Not surprisingly if you look at Chappell's background. If you can get over this minor issue, this book is an excellent read.

This book, which was published in 2004, still remains as one of the best books in my personal collection of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), SOA and related books. The author does a good job of introducing a new computer architecture paradigm! And this is to think of software like hardware. Like hardware, have components that are plug-and-play into a standard bus. Standard interfaces, standard input/output, etc. I found the first three chapters as extremely useful for an overall view. Then I recommend skipping to the fold out to study symbols and icons. Then, I studied chapter 9 which is about ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) as an example that tries to help us understand the essence of ESB. I also spent time on understanding, chapters 10, 11, and 12 which give a good understanding of the Components, Integration, and Web Services. Other chapters in between, for example EAI, MOM, JMS and XML should be looked at more like the "Old paradigm". But if you are focused on ESB/SOA above chapters will give you an excellent overall architecture picture, and, a good taste of what it takes, and what different terms mean. I also think that the author has done a good job of explaining things whith what was available then. This is an evolving and maturing technology even now. I also tried to understand these concepts as they related to BEA WebLogic 9.2 and/or IBM WebSphere to bring more practical parallel understanding. This did help.

Frankly, I feel that some reviewers misunderstand the purpose of this book. In my opinion, for a SOA focussed professional who needs to know the role of SOA, this book is a gem! Any of us who have had the challenge of explaining messaging technology should be grateful about reading this book. As technologists, we forget just how much intimidating jargon we use and how many underlying assumptions we make when we explain things. As a software architect once said to me, "if I had more time, I'd make it simple." Clearly Mr.Chappell has taken on the challenge of making it simple and made it in such a way even an idiot can understand, and such efforts are incredibly valuable.

This book should be required reading for anyone involved with EAI, especially integration architects. For those of you who may not have heard about ESB, it is a rather new approach to structuring a SOA (service-oriented architecture), using a distributed MOM infrastructure, XML messages, intelligent message routing, automatic transformation of messages, and centralized administration. The SOA approach to EAI solutions is compelling, but it is still too early in the game to tell if ESB will take the world by storm. It has a lot of promise, and many EAI vendors are jumping onto the bandwagon that Sonic, including Dave Chappell, helped to build. The book offers the first comprehensive definition of an ESB that I have seen, almost entirely stripped bare of vendor-specific information and sales info. I say almost, for some issues (such as app-servers vs. ESB service containers) are presented in a less vendor neutral fashion than I would like. Overall, the book stays high on useful content, and low on vendor product positioning. The books combines nicely described technical descriptions of ESB features with some high-level case studies culled from Dave's experiences in industry, or based on interviews with IT leaders that he conducted while researching the book. The technical descriptions avoid becoming too detailed, but are sufficient to capture the essential issues encountered in integration. The book's diagrams, resembling Gregor-grams, are very useful, although I was a bit mystified to find a reference card for the glyphs used, tucked away in the back of the book. The diagrams are self-explanatory, IMHO. The case studies are similarly abstract, avoiding introducing a level of detail that would cause the forest to be lost amongst the trees. At times I wished to a little more detail here, but I suspect I'm something of a glutton for punishment that way. ESB is threatening to become something of a buzz word these days, what with IBM weighing into the ESB market. This book should help secure a rational, useful definition of Enterprise Service Bus before the marketing machines of the various integration vendors obliterate it in a storm of white papers and glossy brochures.