This year's
Greater Wisconsin Software Symposium was excellent as usual: it was very well organized and had incredible speakers.
Surprisingly, most of the experts turned out to be not in favor of the ESB. Their thoughts were somewhat similar to those available in the interesting Steve Vinoski’s Blog entry.
If I remember correctly they put the ESB in one row with the many failed attempts (like EJB, for example) to create a software "silver bullet" that will solve all the application integration problems. As Steve notices in his blog "Many developers just want to write some code and plug it into a magical framework that transparently handles all the distribution, persistence, security, transactions, and reliability underneath. Chuckle. Underlying frameworks just grow and grow as they try to provide all this, and so they develop more bugs, more inconsistencies, more special cases, less flexibility, and less reliability as time goes on, not to mention foisting on the unwary the XML configuration hell..."
Another their point was that the ESB is heavy utilized by software giants like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. trying to lure naive customers into a trap of an exclusive contract and make them heavily dependant on one particular vendor product.
At first, it looked more like a exaggeration to me. Just the following Monday, however, I learned that Cape Clear, the ESB vendor that company where I work uses, was acquired by Workday. According to the article, Workday also mentioned that "the Cape Clear ESB will no longer be available as a standalone offering". The future of the ESB at my company has suddenly become uncertain.
Another misconception mentioned in Steve's article is that "Large enterprises believe they can save themselves a lot of money and trouble if they can just get the whole enterprise to agree on a single integration architecture". In reality, states Steve, it never happens.
Both Greater Wisconsin Software Symposium experts and Steve agree that in most of the cases dynamic languages and REST provide much better solution for lowering software development costs and achieving integration and extensibility than the ESB does.
Well, this is definitely something to think about.