Hi Joe,
I've read the Sonic white paper (and several of
their white papers in the past). They [Sonic] will continue to insist
that they invented the first ESB, or at least were the first to coin
the term; and so will Fiorano, and IONA, etc., etc. I attended the last
several Enterprise Architect Summit conferences and Chappell and van Huizen
from Sonic always claim they invented the ESB; they make a point of it.
And then you'd actually get the Fiorano CTO up on the same stage we these guys
and claim that they [Fiorano] created the first ESB. My point is to
approach these guys with caution and try to remain steadfast in seeing
through the marketing hype.
I don't think we will want to include a definition
for ESB in our SOA-RM because although ESB is not a product, it is an
architectural best practice for implementing a SOA and thus better suited for an
architectural blueprints or reference architecture effort. Incidentally,
implementing an ESB requires an integrated set of middleware services (i.e.,
technology) so again, out of our scope. It is important to note, however,
that the ESB concept is intended to support multiple architecture styles, e.g.,
SOAs, message-driven architectures, and event-driven architectures.
So in summary, I would not "sign-up" for any
recommended "RM" or "standard lexicon" or whatever a specific middleware vendor
wishes to push, including Sonic. They have a fine offering in this space
but again, I think our job (and I know you agree) is to remain
vendor-neutral. Frankly, after reading their white papers, they are much
more focused on ESB architecture than a creating a true RM. You
can see that they even refer to the W3C's WS Arch WG definition of SOA
rather than creating their own definition for SOA.
V/R, Jeff E.
