Catch The Enterprise Service Bus
Except for a few vendors making grandiose claims, those involved with SOA have always emphasized that it's a framework or philosophy, not a single product or technology. But in the early days of SOA, the ESB came close to being ubiquitous. While individual SOA implementations might have differed in the systems they interconnected, the messaging protocols they used and the kinds of services they made available, they all included an ESB. Overlapping functionality from other categories means this is no longer always the case, but an ESB remains SOA's foundation.
The ESB has two main functions, both of which have been critical to application integration. At a low level, it's just a collection of interfaces for service-enablement--translating the different APIs of mainframes, ERP systems, CRM servers and other devices or applications into a common language so they can talk to one another. At a higher level, an ESB can orchestrate newly exposed services into composite applications, aka mashups.
In between are features, such as content-based routing, identity mapping and auditing, needed to route messages to and from different services across a large, distributed ESB. Thanks to the increasing number of protocols and data formats used in a SOA, ESBs must include protocol mediation and XML transformation to convert among them.
Although SOA is often described as a means of linking Web services, many enterprises prefer to use JMS (Java Messaging Service) internally, thanks to its relatively low overhead. Protocol mediation is still needed to convert this to HTTP for use with applications that prefer true Web services, as well as for traversing the Internet. Some ESBs also support other protocols, such as e-mail or FTP. In a SOA stack, all of these, and any underlying networks, are regarded as the transport layer.
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