SAP XI versus Sonic's Enterprise Service Bus

[Former Member]

Hi,

Question 1:

In David Chappell's book 'Enterprise Service Bus', the Sonic ESB is described. He says that the ESB is more than a hub-and-spoke integration broker: ESB is a MOM and above that several 'generic' services, which handle the traffic and routing on the bus, for instance:

- Transformation service

- Content based routing service

- Orchestration service

- Splitter service

- Etc.

Is this concept adopted in ESA? If so how is this functionality implemented?

Question 2a: does XI uses xCBL as a XML-dialect?

Question 2b: does XI make use of the canonical-XML concept (by using xCBL) ?

Thanks in advance!

Greetings Theo

[Former Member]

As answer on question 1:

No I never found any documentation from SAP that described a ESB solution. So al the knowledge must come from other vendors in your case from Sonic.

But there is hope you can use XI in a ESB way. You must only (add) configure the ESB parts. This is done by adding a service repository for example the UDDI server in combination with some BPML engine.

By adding it al together you can execute your business processes over multiple system platforms using SOAP in a synchronic way.

This is the basic concept of a ESB.

The answer to question 2.

I don’t know if XI has build in support, but a know that there are free tools that can handle Canonical XML. So you can make a service your self to handle the Canonical XML documents.