ESB core functionality Description
Location transparency The ESB helps with decoupling the service consumer from the
service provider location. The ESB provides a central platform
to communicate with any application necessary without coupling
the message sender to the message receiver.
Transport protocol conversion An ESB should be able to seamlessly integrate applications
with different transport protocols like HTTP(S) to JMS, FTP to
a file batch, and SMTP to TCP.
Message transformation The ESB provides functionality to transform messages from
one format to the other based on open standards like XSLT
and XPath.
Message routing Determining the ultimate destination of an incoming message
is an important functionality of an ESB that is categorized as
message routing.
Message enhancement An ESB should provide functionality to add missing information
based on the data in the incoming message by using message
enhancement.
Security Authentication, authorization, and encryption functionality
should be provided by an ESB for securing incoming messages
to prevent malicious use of the ESB as well as securing outgoing
messages to satisfy the security requirements of the
service provider.
Monitoring and management A monitoring and management environment is necessary to
configure the ESB to be high-performing and reliable and
also to monitor the runtime execution of the message flows
in the ESB.[@more@]