Enterprise Service Bus

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What Does Enterprise Service Bus Mean?

An enterprise service bus (ESB) is an integrated platform that provides fundamental interaction and communication services for complex software applications via an event driven and standards-based messaging engine, or bus, built with middleware infrastructure product technologies. The ESB platform is geared toward isolating the link between a service and transport channel and is used to fulfill service-oriented architecture (SOA) requirements.

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Opinions regarding ESB’s exact definition differ because the term often references ESB’s underlying software infrastructure.

Techopedia Explains Enterprise Service Bus

ESB includes the following core components:

  • Architectural platform
  • Software product
  • Software product package

An ESB provides a conceptual layer for an established enterprise messaging system, which allows integration architects to apply messaging advantages without writing code. Unlike traditional enterprise application integration (EAI) techniques, such as a monolithic hub or spoke structure stack, an ESB is based on simple functions separated as elemental parts with distributed deployment and collaboration, as required.

Additionally, an ESB has metric-based SOA and SOA 2.0 structural elements that provide flexibility and multiple transport media capability. Most ESB providers integrate SOA values while accounting for independent message formats.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.