Enterprise Service Bus - New Middleware solution?

What is Enterprise Service Bus? It is unified integration platform for creating uniquely developed business functions to ride with a flexibility of technologies over which they are called. The hosting platform for discrete Business Functions than working as just a Intgration software based off messaging, object, RPC, or transactional middleware. Do we mean that the integrations are getting smarter every day with this new concept? This perspective towards the integrations will derive new architectures out of Point-2-Point integrations to SOAs. There are so many reasons supporting the need fo ESB.

Capabilities of the Enterprise Service Bus
An Enterprise Service Bus exhibits these minimum, or mandatory, capabilities:

• Communication Supports routing and addressing for at least one messaging style (such as request/response, or publish/subscribe), and at least one transport protocol that is or can be made widely available. This enables location transparency and service substitution, which enables the decoupling of the consumer view of services from their implementation.
• Integration Supports several integration styles or adapters. It enables the provision of services based on these integration capabilities, and decouples technical aspects of service interactions and the integration of services in the enterprise.
• Service interaction Supports an interface definition format and associated messaging model (such as WSDL and SOAP) to allow the decoupling of technical aspects of service interactions.
• Management and autonomic Provides a consistent administration model across a potentially distributed infrastructure, including control over naming, routing, addressing, and transformation capabilities. This enables the management of services in the enterprise.

More advanced ESBs typically offer a number of additional value-added features, including:

• Adapters, to enable connectivity to packaged and custom enterprise applications, as well as to leading technologies.
• Service orchestration engines, to support both long-running (stateful) and short-running (stateless) processes.
• Quality of service and service-level capabilities.
• Presentation services, to enable the creation of personalized portals that aggregate services from multiple sources.

But as Rich Turner validly said, it is just a EAI solution, just at a very standardized platform, or made on the base of open standards. Enterprise Integration Technologies are offered under a new name. Every one who understands a concept of ESB also talks about the SOA. They are mutually different subjects. ESB is a centralized offering from all EAI platforms. It is finally an EAI solution, so whats the big deal about it. It is just the open standards, like WSDL, SOAP etc. There is a very big notion and everybody has denied for several times on internet, that SOA or ESB is not about the web services. Apart from a large number of Integration Companies, some other companies started on new products which are actually called ESB. Cape Clear software, Sonic Software, Celtix Open Source Java ESB. to be continued.....