Advantages of ESB

  Advantages of ESB

An ESB provides the following advantages:

1) It provides graphical way to plug or remove the components.

2) It fastens up the process of marketing your new initiatives.

3) Less time is required to connect different applications so productivity is improved.

4) We can integrate three or more applications or services

5) We can plug  more applications with the passage of time

6) have a number of protocols you'd like to normalize to a single protocol (e.g. FTP, email, SOAP, XMPP, etc. to a messaging system) e.g. ActiveMQ. This lets you decouple the implementation of services from the protocol.

7) We can do message routing capabilities like content-based routing, forking and aggregating message flows

8) The services you publish can be consumed by other applications.

9) You want a consistent way to hook services into this architecture so that they can listen for messages, process messages and generate messages (Message Endpoints, Channel Adapters etc.).

9) You may want a managed container to deploy these various components into (e.g. ServiceMix, Mule)

10) You may want a number of prebuilt components and adapters into various protocols (e.g. ServiceMix, Mule and Camel have a lot of pre-built components).

11) You may require long running workflows. Business Process Management is often something that is provided alongside an ESB (Apache ODE plugs into a number of Open Source ESBs).

Other advantages includes : 

Lightweight: because an ESB is made up of many interoperating services, rather than a single hub that contains every possible service, ESBs can be as heavy or light as an organization needs them to be, making them the most efficient integration solution available.

Easy to expand: If an organization knows that they will need to connect additional applications or systems to their architecture in the future, an ESB allows them to integrate their systems right away, instead of worrying about whether or not a new system will not work with their existing infrastructure.  When the new application is ready, all they need to do to get it working with the rest of their infrastructure is hook it up to the bus.

Scalable and distributable: Unlike broker architectures, ESB functionality can easily be dispersed across a geographically distributed network as needed.  Additionally, because individual components are used to offer each feature, it is much simpler and cost-effective to ensure high availability and scalability for critical parts of the architecture when using an ESB solution. 

SOA-friendly: ESBs are built with Service Oriented Architecture in mind.  This means that an organization seeking to migrate towards an SOA can do so incrementally, continuing to use their existing systems while plugging in re-usable services as they implement them.

Incremental adoption: At first glance, the number of features offered by the best ESBs can seem intimidating.  However, it's best to think of the ESB as an integration "platform", of which you only need to use the components that meet your current integration needs.  The large number of modular components offers unrivaled flexibility that allows incremental adoption of an integration architecture as the resources become available, while guaranteeing that unexpected needs in the future will not prevent ROI.