Large IT organizations increasingly face the challenge of integrating various web services, applications, and other technologies into a single network. The solution to finding a meaningful large-scale architecture that is capable of spanning a global enterprise appears to have been met in ESB, or Enterprise Service Bus. Rather than conform to the hub-and-spoke architecture of traditional enterprise application integration products, ESB provides a highly distributed approach to integration, with unique capabilities that allow individual departments or business units to build out their integration projects in incremental, digestible chunks, maintaining their own local control and autonomy, while still being able to connect together each integration project into a larger, more global integration fabric, or grid.

Enterprise Service Bus offers a thorough introduction and overview for systems architects, system integrators, technical project leads, and CTO/CIO level managers who need to understand, assess, and evaluate this new approach. Written by Dave Chappell, one of the best known and authoritative voices in the field of enterprise middleware and standards-based integration, the book drills down into the technical details of the major components of ESB, showing how it can utilize an event-driven SOA to bring a variety of enterprise applications and services built on J2EE, .NET, C/C++, and other legacy environments into the reach of the everyday IT professional.

With Enterprise Service Bus, readers become well versed in the problems faced by IT organizations today, gaining an understanding of how current technology deficiencies impact business issues. Through the study of real-world use cases and integration patterns drawn from several industries using ESB--including Telcos, financial services, retail, B2B exchanges, energy, manufacturing, and more--the book clearly and coherently outlines the benefits of moving toward this integration strategy. The book also compares ESB to other integration architectures, contrasting their inherent strengths and limitations.

If you are charged with understanding, assessing, or implementing an integration architecture, Enterprise Service Bus will provide the straightforward information you need to draw your conclusions about this important disruptive technology.

David Chappell is vice president and chief technologist for SOA at Oracle Corporation. Chappell has over 20 years of experience in the software industry covering a broad range of roles including Architecture, code-slinging, sales, support and marketing. He is well known worldwide for his writings and public lectures on the subjects of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the enterprise service bus (ESB), message oriented middleware (MOM), enterprise integration, and is a co-author of many advanced Web Services standards.

As author of the O'Reilly Enterprise Service Bus book, Dave has had tremendous impact on redefining the shape and definition of SOA infrastructure. He has extensive experience in distributed computing infrastructure, including ESB, SOA Governance, EJB and Web application server infrastructure, JMS and MOM, EAI, CORBA, and COM. Chappell's experience also includes development of client/server infrastructure, graphical user interfaces and language interpreters.

Chappell is also well noted for authoring Java Web Services (O'Reilly), Professional ebXML Foundations (Wrox) and Java Message Service (O'Reilly). In addition, he has written numerous articles in leading industry publications, such as Business Integration Journal, Enterprise Architect, Java Developers Journal, JavaPro, Web Services Journal, XML Journal and Network World.

Chappell and his works have received many industry awards including the "Java™ Technology Achievement Award" from JavaPro magazine for "Outstanding Individual Contribution to the Java Community" in 2002, and the 2005 CRN Magazine "Top 10 IT leaders" award for "casting larger-than-life shadow over the industry".