Dave Chappell

Since releasing my latest book, Enterprise Service Bus (O'Reilly Media, 2004), I have been doing a fair amount of visiting corporations, conducting seminars, and generally discussing with enterprise architects the subject of enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) and how an enterprise service bus (ESB) backbone can be leveraged to provide a framework for an enterprise SOA. Along the way, I have been asked many questions about the nature of an ESB. I have also fended off some misconceptions that have been growing in the general IT population regarding what an ESB is and when, where, and how it can be used. I have gathered together the most popular questions and misconceptions, and offer some clarity in the form of a "top ten" list. Myth #1. ESB is just a new name for EAI. While many IT architecture groups are focusing on building SOAs, they still inevitably be... (more)

SOA and eXtreme Transaction Processing (XTP)

David Chappell's Blog Across financial services firms we have been seeing a new set of business priorities. There are the "grow the business" priorities that are primarily centered around things like improving customer intimacy and increasing competitive differentiation.  here are also ongoing issues of compliance to regulation and risk mitigation while also keeping an eye towards improving cost efficiency. The thing that hasn't changed is that IT is viewed as the enabler to overcome these challenges.    Financial institutions are pushing the envelope and require more processing... (more)

ESB Integration Patterns

The past several years have seen some significant technology trends, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), enterprise application integration (EAI), business-to-business (B2B), and Web services. These technologies have attempted to address the challenges of improving the results and increasing the value of integrated business processes, and have garnered the widespread attention of IT leaders, vendors, and industry analysts. The enterprise service bus (ESB) draws the best traits from these and other technology trends to form a new architecture for integration. The ESB conc... (more)

Universal Middleware: What's Happening With OSGi and Why You Should Care

The Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) Alliance is working to realize the vision of a "universal middleware" that will address issues such as application packaging, versioning, deployment, publication, and discovery. In this article we'll examine the need for the kind of container model provided by the OSGi, outline the capabilities it would provide, and discuss its relationship to complementary technologies such as SOA, SCA, and Spring. Enterprise software is often composed of large amounts of complex interdependent logic that makes it hard to adapt readily to changes in r... (more)

Message-Centric Web Services vs RPC-Style Web Services

Message-centric vs RPC-style Web services is a long-standing debate and bone of contention regarding the proper use of Web services technologies. Early renditions of SOAP and XML-RPC were all about providing RPC-style interactions...in fact, that's all that was supported, so there really wasn't much choice in the matter. RPC-style interfaces have their advantages: immediate gratification of request/response, and a programming model whereby remote procedures are exposed in a way that mimics the underlying object architecture of the applications concerned, allowing a developer to ... (more)