Enterprise service bus (ESB) is a software architecture construct, which lives between the (business) applications and enables communication among them. Ideally, the ESB should be able to replace all direct contact with the applications on the bus, so that all communication takes place via the ESB.
ESB provides its fundamental services via an event-driven and standards-based messaging engine (the bus). Thanks to ESB, integration architects can exploit the value of messaging without writing code. Developers typically implement an ESB using technologies found in a category of middleware infrastructure products, usually based on recognized standards.
ESB is a relatively new concept. The term has only been in common use for the last several years. People often associate ESBs and Service Oriented Architecture (SOAs) but they are somewhat orthogonal concerns. However, like SOA, ESB is essentially a collection of enterprise architecture design patterns that is now implemented directly by many enterprise software products.
The WSO2 ESB is a fast, light-weight and versatile Enterprise Service Bus product released under the Apache License v2.0. Using WSO2 ESB you can filter, transform, route and manipulate SOAP, binary, plain XML, and text messages that pass through your business systems by HTTP, HTTPS, JMS, mail, etc.
