IS to become an Enterprise Service Bus

5

Mark,

Thanks again for sharing your valuable exprerience - publish JMS requests to JMS topics instead of calling EJBs remotely.

Since this is a forum type discussion I hope you don’t mind me probing a little further the above IS-ESB pros:

  1. “support for many protocols simultaneously”. From our existing business requirements we seldom need more than one protocol (mostly SOAP, a few JMS, and fewer FTP) supported for a specific solution implementation.
    If multiple and simultaneous protocol support are not needed why use IS?

  2. “rich transformation capabilities” I have looked at the IS transformation language set - WQL on top of XQL. I compare it with XQuery and find out that XQuery is the current XML W3C standard (a superset of XQL) versus WQL being a proprietary language format. There are more XQuery open source helper libraries available that are maintained worldwide. By far more tutorials and knowledge sharing. Other tools like MetaMatrix have standartised on XQuery as well. Implementing transformations in XQuery for enterprise has the effect of less vendor dependency - both WM and MetaMatrix tools can share the same enterprise transformation library.

  • Does wM have plans to standartise on XQuery?

  1. “work in Flow” - will have to read more upon this - I am somewhat new to IS. But wouldn’t this be the job of a specific business process and workflow - not necessary an ESB feature?

  2. “Multi-threaded, concurrent execution of services” We have successfully used Stateless Session Beans to accomplish both - our developers have never had to manually manage threading nor transactions - J2EE container given. Except Stateless Session Beans I agree on - “bloated overhead of J2EE”

  3. IS at its core is a centralized ESB type. That has cons - most real business requirments are simple and do not require various set of IS-ESB capabilities. If one does not need simultaneous protocol support, integration adapters have been already implemented somewhere else, and in Flow is also implemented somewhere else - what is the value of IS? In this case a light-weight distributed ESB would do a better job. Axis2 with corresponding WS-* implementations would be a good alternative, right? Why should one use a swiss army knife for all his needs? Isn’t it the case that in reality we use a different knife to cut bread, another for meat, and etc.?

Again - speaking my mind here … hope you don’t mind.

Thanks again for your answers,
Regards Radui.