Application integration strategy

The notion of helping corporations link disparate platforms and applications and tie them into an overarching system is one of the treasured Holy Grail of the industry.

This week our Technology Update is penned by one company – Sonic – who is chasing that Grail with application integration technology called enterprise service bus (ESB).

ESB, which competes with application servers products from vendors such as BEA Systems, IBM, SeeBeyond and Tibco, consists of a distributed set of Communication Servers, or message brokers, and Sonic Service Containers, which are the application endpoints.

Further, our author (gvh@sonicsoftware.com) says that an ESB is a standards-based, service-oriented backbone capable of connecting hundreds of application endpoints. ESBs combine messaging, Web services, XML, data transformation and management to reliably connect and coordinate the interaction of applications.

The bottom line is that ESBs set up a grid where numerous applications can plug into regardless of the protocols, formats or platforms they use.

There’s more to it than this though. For more on ESBs see: https://www.nwfusion.com/news/tech/2003/0602techupdate.html

CORRECTION: The url in the recent newsletter about Apache was incorrect. The correct URL is:

https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0526apache.html