The future of the ESB

Loek Bakker's weblog: Understanding the future of the ESB: "It's so simple: ultimately, when all the parts have the ability to work together (i.e.: they all can communicate through messages, which will be the bus), the role of the ESB will be like the role of DNS for the Internet: addressing and routing. Nothing more, nothing less."

I suggest that he overstates the role of DNS. It doesn't really do routing. That is the job of routers and switches.

I generally agree that the capability we want for the end-points to do the processing, so that the actually communicaiton flow is point-to-point. But that point-to-point connectivity is not exposed to the application. I want to be able to modify application behaviours and policies as if it all went through a central hub, but don't want to actaully make a network hop and who-knows-how-many context switches in order to perform any routings and transformations.

Using DNS as an example, browsers look-up (resolve) domain names only occasionally, and then direct their traffic to the end-point directly. In some cases the end-point may do some virtualization and wrokload management at the far end, but all of that is of no consequence to the requestor. This is the way the applications should work with an ESB.