The Internet Service Bus

Service oriented architectures (SOA) increasingly form the basis for cooperative information systems. Many enterprises and application solutions have been practicing SOA for many years. SOA is an architecture that IT practitioners can layer on many technologies: messaging, RPC, etc. Most SOA solutions are evolving to exploit an "enterprise service bus" for integrating and connecting applications. Web services are a set of standards that simplifies building cooperative information systems. The standards eliminate the need to enable the infrastructure to cooperate before enabling application cooperation. Web services exploitation of Internet protocols and concepts creates an additional opportunity. Many, if not most, cooperating information systems have elements in different organizations: enterprises, sites, lines-of-business, etc. The same architectural style that led to an enterprise services bus will yield an Internet Service Bus. This presentation will explain the Internet Service Bus concepts using a scenario. The scenario will also highlight many of the benefits of an ISB. There are several interesting technical and architectural challenges for building and using an ISB, which the presentation will discuss.