AJUG's ESB Meeting: June 20

[Burr Sutter]

Date: 6/20/2006
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Holiday Inn Select
Directions: http://www.ajug.org/meetings.html
Description:
There is a lot of buzz about SOA and ESB these days, but what does it
mean to actually implement on one? This talk will answer questions
like:

What is an ESB?
Where and why would an architect and developer use one?
What tools are available for working with an ESB?
How to use and implement various core ESB concepts such as routers,
transformers, and messaging connectors?

ESB's vendors are promising easy integration and reuse by providing
frameworks for implementing Service Oriented Architectures. But many
vendors have clouded the principals and patterns needed by the actual
developer with a lot of buzzwords and fluff.

That said, SOA does seem to be gaining traction. IT organizations are
looking for more reuse of their applications and better agility in
responding to changing business needs. If adopted, the applications we
build may be required to plug in to the corporate ESB. As developers
we need to know how to partition our applications into functional
services that can be used and reused by external applications. We also
need to know how to find and reuse existing services so we can deliver
more quickly.

There are many patterns and tools found in ESB frameworks that can
make a developer's life much easier. These frameworks provide the
tools to handle many common problems such as message routing and
message transformation. It is often the case that a standard POJO can
be exposed to over a dozen different messaging technologies ranging
from Web Services to email to flat file simply by making configuration
changes within the ESB. For existing applications, developers can use
the frameworks to expose existing components such as EJBs as services
in the ESB using simple configuration.

Although popular, application integration is not the only application
of ESBs. These services based frameworks are also being applied in the
areas of grid computing, networking, and as simple messing layer
abstractions inside applications.

ESBs have their challenges. Services often have asynchronous
interfaces and this mode of development can sometimes be confusing. It
is also difficult to manage the configuration in an ESB that covers
many different applications. It is not uncommon for entire
applications (or versions of the applications) to come and go as
services participating in the ESB. Speakers:

Brian Cochran and Eric Stevens own and operate Atlanta CS, a software
consulting firm specializing in ESB technology. They have spent the
last year and a half defining and deploying ESBs in grid computing
environments. Their ESB deployments have fulfilled very high
transaction volumes and the integration of 100's of disparate
technologies ranging from various legacy enterprise systems to
millions of embedded devices. Prior to founding Atlanta CS, Brian's
experience as a Lead Architect found him creating high volume
transactional systems and analytics products now deployed at several
fortune 100 companies in the insurance and financial services
industry. Brian holds a BS in computer science from Georgia Tech with
Highest Honors.
Eric Stevens has extensive experience in software architecture and
software products in the financial services and insurance industries.
Mr. Stevens has led numerous projects involving frameworks, scheduling
systems, analytical systems, and site management systems. Mr. Stevens
is an Honors graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Free Seminar on Agile Development:
http://www.rallydev.com/register_for_roadshow_2006.jsp

And as always we would like to thank our sponsors for their contributions:
- Anteo Group (www.anteogroup.com)
- JBoss (www.jboss.com)
- Sun Microsystems (www.java.net/www.sun.com)

Sincerely,
Burr