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Enterprise Service Bus Concepts

Enterprise Service Bus Concepts

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provides a single point to both access and govern applications that have SOAP, REST, or other network APIs. The ESB provides the following capabilities:

  • Provides a centralized location to discover and access the services.

  • Isolates applications from detailed knowledge of the services, allowing you to change the description of a service in a single location without having to update all applications that are dependent on it. For example, you can change the address of the server or even the API of the service and handle the changes in the ESB. This provides protocol independence to your applications. If an application is developed using a SOAP API but a new service provides additional functionality with a REST API, the ESB can make the new REST service available as both REST and SOAP APIs allowing you to add the functionality of the new service while maintaining compatibility for existing applications.

  • Provides a mechanism to organize and track the applications used by the enterprise and the dependencies between these applications. For example, the ESB can provide the contact information for technical support when a user has problems with an application.

Why would you need an ESB? Consider the following scenario:

  1. Your enterprise has developed many critical applications. Each application has its own environment and user interface and is independent of the other applications.

  2. You face new problems and competitive requirements to increase efficiency. To solve these problems you must get these independent applications to communicate and interact with each other.

  3. You modify the applications to provide access via a SOAP or REST API.

  4. You start to develop new applications calling these SOAP and REST APIs. These new applications can combine the functionality of the existing applications, making it possible to combine workflows and streamline procedures.

  5. But each of these new applications requires detailed knowledge of the applications it is using: the address of the server running the application and the specific API needed to access the application.

  6. As the number of these new applications grow, it becomes more difficult to maintain the overall collection of applications. Simply moving a service to a new server or making any change to the functionality of a service requires you to update every application dependent on it. It can be difficult even finding out which applications are dependent on a service.

  7. Users are uncertain who to contact when they run into problems.

Using InterSystems IRIS as an ESB allows you to create a unified mechanism for accessing services. This makes it easier to maintain the set of applications and provides a mechanism to track usage and identify potential blockages˙

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