The Times They Are A-changin ': Steve Vinoski and the ESB Question

In a recent post Steve Vinoski said:

Frankly, if I were an enterprise architect today, and I were genuinely concerned about development costs, agility, and extensibility, I’d be looking to solve everything I possibly could with dynamic languages and REST, and specifically the HTTP variety of REST. I’d avoid ESBs and the typical enterprise middleware frameworks unless I had a problem that really required them (see below). I’d also try to totally avoid SOAP and WS-*.

It is easy to dismiss this as just another yahoo who goes against conventional wisdom until you remember that Steve spent more than a decade working in Iona in leading roles like Chief Engineer of product
innovations and helped develop some of the middleware standards for OMG and W3C.

Well, I guess that's becoming an epidemic now :). Just recently we had Michael Stonebreaker talking about the RDBMS demise, Pat Helland talking about life beyond distributed transactions. and now Steve on ESBs.

That trend aside, I think Steve is doing throwing the baby out with the bath water. The dream of a single infrastructure for an enterprise is ludicrous enough (remeber Peter Deutsch and the "The network is
homogeneous" fallacy). But if you drop the "E" from the ESB moniker you get a valuable middleware which is very usable in many situations and not just legacy system integration. For instance one thing that is missing form "HTTP variety of REST" implementation is reliable messaging. Location transparency is harder to solve with HTTP etc.

Another problem I have with the current approach of Steve is that he is replacing one dogma (EBSs are good) with another (ESBs are bad use Ruby, REST). This is not a healthy approach. The solution should match the problem, that's probably the primary reason why we need architects after all.

Posted by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz at 06:49 PM  Permalink