Most organizations considering or in the midst of deploying a service-oriented architecture (SOA) are familiar with the concept or even the many varied definitions of the term enterprise service bus (ESB). In fact, ESBs are becoming a critical part of an SOA.
Interestingly, Gartner just released data stating that more than half of all large enterprises will have at least the core of an ESB running by year-end 2006. The rising interest in ESBs is based on their ability to increase scalability, ease of change and quality of service for large and frequently changed SOA and event-driven architectures.
With the anticipated increase in ESB deployments as well as the rise in SOAs, the following takes a look at the role of Web services in an ESB.
