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Showing posts from July, 2011

The Case for a Short Bus

We’re building an event-driven architecture (EDA) for our client, so it makes sense that a part of our domain model is going to deal with events. The mountain of concerns associated with moving events around in an EDA is most often handled by an enterprise service bus (ESB). How many concerns, you ask? Just take a look at Wikipedia’s list of “core capabilities” – the ones that “most observers accept” as part of an ESB’s responsibility. There’s a lot going on there! This is why I have a lot of respect for traditional ESBs and the developers who make them. Unfortunately, in addition to respect, I also have a lot of trepidation when it comes to choosing, installing, configuring, and using an ESB. A lot of the installation and configuration deals with capabilities that I don’t use and the API for those capabilities distracts me from the main use case: creating and consuming events. I wish that traditional ESBs were more like the Spring stack – a set of capabilities that don’t depend on