Bring on the Enterprise Service Bus
As XML became the lingua franca of document exchanges in the commercial world and ultimately in the justice world following the adoption of the Global Justice XML Data Model, state and local agencies began to explore the development of web services to deliver the XML content. It quickly became clear that the effective use of web services demanded a services oriented architecture (SOA) to make web services available to multiple business applications. As more and more agencies endorsed the concept of SOA, the need for an underlying infrastructure became obvious to many.
The emerging answer in state and local government is the enterprise service bus (ESB). A number of states are fully committed to using an ESB as the information highway to allow interoperability and information sharing between state and local systems and across disciplines. Wisconsin and New Jersey have fully committed to using the ESB approach, taking very different environments to create the ESB. This approach is getting serious attention from vendors (both traditional and new) as companies see the demand increase for this approach to integration.
Some of the vendors who have engaged most directly on the development of the ESB and its development tools include Cape Clear and Sonic Software. In addition, the established toolkits associated with Microsoft BizTalk and IBM Websphere are increasingly supportive of the ESB approach to building the information exchange infrastructure. Microsoft's Indigo messaging bus appears to have the functionality that ESB is generally about.
Lawrence Moroney writes in Devx about the latest open source API approach to building the ESB, which more or less completes the acknowledgement that the ESB is fast becoming the accepted approach to system integration across multiple jurisdictions. Moroney describes how to use the Mule ESB framework to create your own ESB without the commercial software.
When leading companies, new companies, and open source work appear to be on a common track, the odds are pretty good that this trend is real. In the evolution of information exchanges, the ESB is definitely on the high road.
11:17:13 PM 
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