Rourke McNamara

People have been using the term ESB — short for Enterprise Service Bus — for quite a few years now. Despite that, there continues to be enormous confusion over what the term means. This confusion stems from the fact that people have overloaded the term ESB and are using it to mean two different things. When people talk about ESBs, they are either talking about ESB products (ESBp) or ESB implementations (ESBi). No one can sell you an ESB implementation, just as no one can sell you an SOA. However, you can and should buy products that help to implement this design pattern.

David Linthicum recently wrote a great piece on designing for performance in SOA-based development environments. It’s good to see an influential SOA blogger talking about performance; there’s far too little talk about performance among analysts and thought leader. Performance and scalability are extremely important, and if you don’t consider them from the beginning and design for performance you will pay for it later.

In traditional application development, architects could get away with ignoring performance concerns when the application in question had very minor load and latency requirements. In the world of SOA this isn’t an option. The service you write today for a low load application will be re-used tomorrow in a high load environment.

Yesterday Matt Quinn of TIBCO Software, Inc. talked about Service Virtualization at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services conference in Orlando. Matt started his presentation by saying that Service Virtualization is:

Functionality designed to reduce complexity of communication, location and control as service networks increase in size.

Service Virtualization, a key feature of TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid, is a technology meant to help companies deal with the complexity that comes with doing large-scale heterogeneous SOA. Period. Matt spent some time at the beginning introducing some of the problems companies with large service networks are beginning to face, including communications management and service scaling challenges. Matt then talked about how TIBCO’s approach to Service Virtualization helps to solve these problems.