One of the best attended sessions at the SOA Conference in Redmond last week was actually the last session on the last day when usually most people would be headed towards the airport. It was on the ESB Guidance that has been in the works for several months. Marty Wasznicky demo'd the final release bits and discussed the most recent refinements and changes. He was basically done at that point, just waiting for the final i's to be dotted and t's to be crossed on the deployment package and for it all to be put up live on MSDN. I've been hitting refresh on my browser all week trying to get the latest for a demo we are working on. Finally it's here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb931189.aspx!
I won't go into detail here on what the ESB Guidance is since its all in the documentation, but in a nutshell it is a set of free components that work with BizTalk and enable Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) scenarios. This is huge because ESB is currently all the rage in SOA-land. Time and again we see BizTalk in head-to-head competition with the likes of IBM/Tibco/BEA to be the ESB of a large SOA initiative at a company. BizTalk was SOA-before-SOA-was-cool, but it does lack out of the box a handful of the features currently expected in an ESB. This ESB Guidance provides the needed components (mostly implemented as pipeline components) to supplement BizTalk so it can legitamately claim to be an ESB. The architecture and components here were harvested from large customer engagements where BizTalk is successfully being used as the ESB.
Congrats to Marty Wasznicky for his vision and relentless hard work to make this a reality.
Contents
ReBlogger Contents
Email TopXML