How do I get access to all this middleware?
My organization recently wrestled with the question of whether to include various middleware products / concepts in our applications. The products we are looking at are things like Pegasystems, Oracle BPM / BPEL, BizTalk, Fair Isaac Blaze, etc. Etc. Etc.
But I find it difficult to deal with it. Before moving on to assessing the usefulness (positive or negative) of these different products, I try to understand all the concepts in this space. I am overflowing with the alphabet suffix BPM, ESB, SOA, CEP, WF, BRE, ERP, etc. Some products seem to cover one or more of these aspects, others focus on how to do so. The terms all seem to be very ambiguous and combined with each other.
Is there a good resource to get a handle on all of these different middleware concepts / patterns? Book? Website? An article that summarizes it well? Bonus points if there is a resource that displays the various popular products they turn to.
Thanks,
~ Justin
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I have spent the last 3-4 years blogging on the topics you mentioned ( http://www.UdiDahan.com ) as well as writing my own lightweight ESB ( http://www.NServiceBus.com ) and have been working for many more years and consult in this space. The main takeaway I've come to is that strong business intelligence and technology-agnostic architecture is needed - no tool or technology can prevent clutter on its own.
There is a book, Enterprise Integration Patterns, which contains a good catalog of technical patterns, but is not covered by the necessary business analysis. I've found that Value Networks ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_network_analysis ) can be used as a good start for defining business boundaries to which IT boundaries can be aligned, resulting in SOA benefits, and using ESB through these boundaries are justified.
CEP, WF and BRE must be used within the border, not across it.
ERP packages tend to cross boundaries and, as such, must be integrated piece by piece within specified boundaries - DDD-DDD protection layers can be used to isolate custom logic from these applications.
Hope it helps.
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IBM and Oracle are SOA certified. Since they are the market leaders (Gartner Magic Quadrant), I would read about how they define SOA and ESB (along with the methodology and components required to support SOA such as governance, registry, etc.). This will give you the high-level overview you are looking for and the use cases "all this middleware" is trying to resolve.
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