BEA's Bus

BEA Systems is having a very busy summer. I can only imagine what it's like to work there -- keep your summer vacation time down to a day, please. 

In June, the vendor unvieled its AquaLogic product line and strategy. Just recently, the vendor started shipping products, starting with an enterprise service service bus called AquaLogic Service Bus 2.0.

AquaLogic Service Bus is designed to help accelerate deployment of SOA infrastuctures. BEA categorizes its AquaLogic line as "service infrastructure" software, designed to make it possible for services to be discovered, secured, managed and assembled into composite applications and processes -- regardless of the technology.

Now, there's been quite a bit of discussion in the trade media and blogosphere about whether ESBs are part of SOAs, or alternatives to SOAs, or even if they exist at all. We've covered some of that muck on this blogsite, here and here.

David Chappell, in a recent article, does a nice job of clearing the air on ESBs and their role in SOAs. To quote Dave: "Enterprises build service-oriented architectures, and an ESB is the backbone upon which to build it. As a result of the tumultuous disruption to the integration market caused by the advent of the ESB, some established integration vendors have laid down a smokescreen by saying that an ESB is simply an abstract pattern that can be overlaid across a composition of existing middleware and application server infrastructure that they already have. In fact, an ESB is definitely a coherent piece of infrastructure that you have been able to purchase from a number of vendors for at least a couple of years now."