Configuration based ESB

I think that anyone who read my previous posts can see that I work allot with ESBs – the blog posts were mostly dedicated to IBM, but I work with OSB, JBossESB and some other solutions as well.

I am amazed at just how much work customers invest in ESB development – they build an architecture, build a development team – and usually, 99% of the work they do – is the same across all organizations.

Because everybody are using ESB in the same way – to enforce web services policies – usually security, but also validation, version management, monitoring and a bit more.

So – what do all these off-the-shelf products give us? Not enough.

I believe that a new generation of ESB is in order – one that will not require coding. The ESB should contain a single point of entry for all services in the organization, all will follow a configured validation and enrichment path, and at the end will be directed to the actual service. No coding, no development team – just simple configuration. Should definitely suffice most customers.

I have a few ideas on an architecture of such a thing, and Aluna even has a small product based on open source technologies, that runs with both .net and Java clients.

But that is another story.