posted 13 years ago
ESB is a beast. It provides you with a lot of features related to service management.
The idea is to write the business logic as a web service, then put it behind an ESB and you can implement things like security, rate limiting, protocol mediation, service versioning, etc. using the ESB.
ESBs help you do these things at a common point for all the services and the services are unaware of the work done before the request reaches them.
The result being that the services are only concerned about business logic and the IT/Admin related work is done behind the scenes. Also, these actions can be applied to all the deployed services seamlessly.
Having said the above, the mileage of using an ESB comes only if your application foresees usage of the functionalities that ESB provides. Using an esb is many a times a company level decision and depends on the size of the services deployed for the organization.
It has its advantages but you would not use a sword where a needle can be handy.
[ May 30, 2008: Message edited by: Nitesh Kant ]