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choose from. Therefore, my aim in this chapter is to arm you with the most transferable and
portable knowledge no matter what ESB you chose.
In some cases, vendors, such as Oracle, Software AG, IBM, TIBCO, and others, offer “SOA
suites” that comprise a collection of products such as an ESB, an orchestration engine, a
SOAP engine, an enterprise registry/repository, a BPEL engine and design-time tools, Busi-
ness Activity Monitoring and related tools, and more. The features present in these products
from vendor to vendor are not consistent. For example, you might have an ESB from one
vendor that handles transformations for you, and another ESB product that delegates trans-
formations to an orchestration engine.
It can all get very confusing. You can get a standalone orchestration engine, such as Apache
ODE or Active Endpoints VOS, as well as standalone ESBs. Some ESBs run on an application
server. Some vendors, such as Oracle, include a “light” subset of orchestration functions dir-
ectly in their ESB but also sell an orchestration product.
For all of these reasons, I abandon the problem/solution format for this chapter. You might
even wonder why this chapter is included at all. In my view, an ESB is the backbone of SOA,
and I hope this chapter will illustrate its benefits.
