muSOAing for 4/21/09

Belushi still filling up. Is an ESB at the heart of every SOA implementation. Actually no. Coming to think of it you may be able to get by with your own light-weight services invocation framework or you could also do with a heavy weight process engine such as WLI or BizTalk. A lot of the features of an ESB such as content based routing, mediation, data transformation, process/service orchestration and security can be handled by these process engine. May required some coding though which is the only downside. With an ESB everything is thru configuration.

If you have complex orchestration needs at the service level or process level then you are better off using these process engines. In my opinion an ESB is a nice to have. They also cost a lot of money to do a Cost/Benefit analysis before taking the next step and signing on the dotted line.