EAI Vs ESB Vs SOA

ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) :

ESB is a technical implementation that aids in delivering an SOA. It gives API which can be used to develop services and makes services interact with each other reliably. Technically ESB is a messaging backbone that does protocol conversion, message format transformation, routing, accept and deliver messages from various services and applications which are linked to ESB.

Current EAI landscape is seeing many vendors who offer enterprise service bus and claim it to be a brand new concept. This brings a question on what exactly is the difference between ESB and the bus-based implementations which have been there in market for quite a long time now. Actually, there is not much difference between ESB and proprietary buses except for a few subtle ones. The main difference between ESB and proprietary bus implementation is of cost which is significantly low for ESB. The reason for this cost difference is two-fold, the first proprietary bus offers lot of built-in functionalities as a suite of product that need to be developed for ESB implementations based on business requirements, the second most proprietary buses use some proprietary formats to enhance the performance and that increases the cost. ESB on the other hand is usually standard-based, so it is a tradeoff between performance and cost between proprietary bus and ESB. The main advantage of ESB is that it costs much less than hub/spoke or bus-based product suits and that it is standard-based.

To Be Continued...