Tijs Rademakers

Open Source ESB's is written in a somewhat clear style. The authors know their stuff and demonstrate their knowledge in clear prose. Having said that, I'm still not convinced that ESB is a solution to the integration problem. Judging from the work the two authors put into this book to cover two implementations, ESB looks like a solution in search of a problem. The effort required to integrate two or more applications using ESB appears to this programmer to be much larger, more complicated and much more brittle than a simple pared down solution (like using JMS directly, instead of traipsing through four or five different technologies to achieve the same results).



If you're job requires that you know ESB then this is an appropriate book to read. It will get you started with Service Mix and Mule. But if your looking for an integration solution that's simple and easy to use, ESB isn't that solution. In my opinion, you'd be better off hard coding the applications to talk to one another than use ESB (I wouldn't recommend that either but if you were faced with those two choices, hard coding is a simpler and less brittle solution to maintain than the overhead of ESB).… (altro)