Sam Gentile writes that ESB Enables Real-World SOA, and says
"People like the REST people think that integration is not that big of a deal, and that a few interconnections can make the world work. The reality is that services require care and feeding (governance), and mediation, and transformation, are almost universally required because there is no single standard for interoperability, and that’s fine."
http://samgentile.com/blogs/samgentile/archive/2007/10/04/esbs-enable-real-world-soa.aspx
Fighting words. He goes on to explain how an ESB can achieve Real-World SOA, independent of the REST/SOAP debate.
There are other options, though. With an XML Gateway, you can also support both REST and SOAP, but also get the advantage of accelerated XML processing. XML Gateways also support the "care and feeding (governance), and mediation, and transformation" mentioned above.
To illustrate this, I've setup a policy which allows an Axis SOAP Web Service to be called using a browser with a HTTP GET, bookmarked, and cached. This all goes through Vordel's XML Gateway:
And here is the exact same Web Service being called using the SOAPbox SOAP client, again through the XML Gateway:
Both requests go through the XML Gateway which is configured using a policy which converts HTTP GET to SOAP on-the-fly. So it isn't a case of "either/or" for SOAP And REST.
Adding support for WS-Security, for signing, or for threat detection is literally as easy as dragging policy elements onto the policy canvas, as shown below:
As well as the XML Acceleration advantages, another advantage of using an XML Gateway is that traffic to Web Services, whether SOAP or REST, is fed into Web Services usage metrics, as shown below in VordelReporter:
You can do the same protocol mediation in an ESB, but you lose some of the advantages of XML Gateways: e.g. Service Virtualization, inbuild XML threat analysis, and underlying XML Acceleration.
So, an ESB *is* a way to create Real-World SOA (where people are not trying to use REST for everything) but I think XML Networking Gateways are also crucial enablers of Real-World SOA too.
5:59:32 PM 
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