I hope you have enjoyed this journey through the ESB architecture and its applied use. Here are the key points you should take away from this book regarding what an ESB is and how it should be applied within an organization:
The enterprise is far from integrated.
An ESB provides the implementation backbone for an event-driven SOA.
An ESB provides a loosely coupled, event-driven SOA with a highly distributed universe of named routing destinations across a multiprotocol message bus.
An ESB is a standards-based integration platform that combines messaging, web services, data transformation, and intelligent routing to reliably connect and coordinate the interaction of significant numbers of diverse applications across extended enterprises with transactional integrity.
An ESB is not an academic exercise; it was born out of necessity. It is based on mature technology that exists today, and is well suited for adopting the evolving interoperability technologies of tomorrow.
An ESB is based on the philosophy that integration should be pervasive across an enterprise.
Pervasiveness includes being suitable for any general-purpose integration project, no matter how large or how small.
An ESB supports incremental adoption, which allows you to implement locally and integrate globally.
An ESB provides the underpinnings for solving problems that scale beyond the barriers of EAI and into the realm of B2B and supply chains.
The ESB concept is based on a highly distributed, lightweight, remotely managed service container, which allows the selective deployment of independently scalable integration components exactly where you need them.
An ESB does not require installing a full application server stack or a full integration broker implementation at every site that requires integration components.
An ESB is built upon a highly distributed, multiprotocol, standards-based message bus.