Jim Webber = SOA - ESB

Just listened to a classic talk from Jim Webber about SOA and ESB. Jim Webber is a big name in the SOA space and is coming to Australia shortly to talk at the JAOO conference. In this talk he explains why SOA is good and why ESB is bad. It is very thought-provoking and entertaining. He thinks that your integration should be web services, but you don't want a big proprietary piece of middleware sitting in the middle of your enterprise.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/webber-guerilla-soa

My favourite quote is his response to a question about orchestration at the end:

Orchestration is just a programming language. So if you want to build a service using a visual orchestration language, you're entirely entitled to do that. Provided you don't pollute the rest of the service ecosystem, that's great. I caution you that probably Java, C# or VB, or for heavens sake Haskell, will be a more productive environment for you to work in than sticks and boxes and lines - but if you're insistent you want to do that, that's great. Just don't think that you can draw a picture and then hit the button and get deployed into production. Because that's crack smoking fantasy time!