Presented: Thursday, July 31, 2008 - 6:45pm
Presenter: Chad Vawter, Software Engineer, Jewelry Television

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has emerged and gradually matured as a means by which to make software assets available and reusable within and across corporate and geographic boundaries. What, exactly, is an SOA, though? What is an enterprise service bus, or ESB? What is a message bus? How are these concepts and technologies related, and how and when can they be used effectively?

This presentation, to be given by Chad Vawter at our next KNOTHead meeting (July 31, 2008 @ EdFinancial Services) will be given in an effort to illustrate message-oriented integration as a fundamental characteristic of successful ESB-based service orchestrations. The idea of an ESB will be presented within the context of an event-driven architecture (EDA) as a means by which to respond to “events” with reusable services and with reusable, message-based service orchestrations.

Protocol transformation and the variety of protocols supported by many of the leading commercial and open-source ESB products will discussed within the context of their defining characteristics-reliability (or lack of it), a transactional nature (or lack of one), and their synchronous and/or asynchronous features.

The predominantly message-oriented integration patterns described in the Enterprise Integration Patterns book will be offered as a common vocabulary for integration efforts, much like the Gang of Four design patterns book has served us as a vocabulary for object-oriented design.

Finally, if time permits, complex event processing (CEP) and event-stream processing (ESP) will be introduced as opportunities made available with an underlying messaging architecture.