Is XI a true ESB?

[Former Member]

I have read a couple of threads about XI as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), but thought I would ask my question directly.

I am interested in feedback regarding whether anyone believes XI provides publish-subscribe capabilities supporting a bus architecture?

My thought has always been that XI-WAS does not provide this capability directly through standard interfacing design and configuration. One would have to publish an interface as a web service from XI-WAS. In addition, one would have to put these services onto a UDDI directory (assumed not SAP delivered) with appropriate security authorization for them to be realized outside of XI-WAS by a web service consumer. Otherwise web service consumers would have to search in the XI-WAS directly for this information (which is not stored in any logical manner, but defined in both the IR and ID).

My thought with other integration tools (like TIBCO) is that this "bus architecture" already resides internal to the Integration Server and offered as a standard option regardless if the interface is defined as a web service or not.

Are my thoughts correct? Please correct me where I am wrong.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Kirk,

Have you looked at these threads?

cheers,

Prashanth

P.S Please mark helpful answers

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Yes. I looked at these already, but none of them provide a "yes" or "no" to the question, "is XI an ESB". More often than not, the comments lead me to the conclusion that XI has some capabilities of an ESB, but limited, especially when speaking about publish-subscribe scenarios. Thoughts?

[Former Member]

Please keep in mind that ESB is basically a new term coined by the industry analysts and vendors for marketing purposes.

David Chappell in his book "Enterprise Service Bus" defines an ESB as "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".

So, is XI an ESB? Sure. As are lots of other products that are traditionally regarded as EAI hubs. There are darn few things that you can do with an "ESB" that you can't do with XI or some other integration hub.

So, asking is "so and so product an ESB" is pretty pointless.

Now, you CAN debate whether or not you need a hub or a bus architecture for your integration needs. But, just to confuse things there are many, in fact I would say most, "ESB" products in the market that DO NOT use a bus architecture.

The primary reason to use a bus architecture is to support pub/sub scenarios. Pub/Sub is important and appropriate for some situations, but the VAST majority of integration problems that I have seen are point to point. In these cases, I prefer hub and spoke.

Hope this helps.

[Former Member]

You must not work with too many clients, because a majority of mine assume XI provides the capabilities defined by an ESB. The question is therefore not "pointless" as you indicate. The most important of these is the pub/sub and they want to understand why. Since XI does not provide this functionality, I quite frankly can not recommend it as an ESB solution. So even though clients are performing point-to-point, the idea of using an enterprise integration tool is to move away from this where possible.

[Former Member]

Kirk to answer your question in basic terms. Is XI an ESB or not? The answer is NO. XI is not an ESB. It is more of a traditional MOM based / Hub and Spoke based EAI solution. The attributes of an ESB are that it must be highly performant, extremely lightweight in footprint, multi-transport, multi-protocol messaging bus that enforces SLA's. Moreover it is typically deployed in a very distributed environment where one ESB may talk to other ESB's. Hope this answers your question. Typically when you think of XI think Hub and Spoke EAI NOT ESB.

[Former Member]

Hi Kirk,

These answer ur question..

( Look at Shehryar Khan's answer)

(Edward's answer)

Hope this solves your query

cheers,

Prashanth

P.S Please mark helpful answers