SOA和ESB，摘录自virtuas公司

virtuas公司就是Appfuse的作者Matt Raible的公司，这个公司位于USA的丹佛，他是由一群独立的顾问组成的咨询公司。他们也提供SOA+ESB的服务。

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Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) are two buzzwords in enterprise IT today. But many organizations do not fully understand or take advantage of what they have to offer.

An SOA is essentially a collection of services. These services communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed.

An ESB is a standards-based integration platform that combines messaging, web services, and data transformation to reliably connect and coordinate the interaction of significant numbers of diverse applications across extended enterprises with transactional integrity.

Open source software and SOA/ESB are not co-joined by projects such as ServiceMix, released under the Apache license. It is lightweight and embeddable, has integrated Spring support and can be run at the edge of the network (inside a client or server), as a standalone ESB provider or as a service within another ESB. You can use ServiceMix in Java SE or a Java EE application server. ServiceMix is completely integrated into Apache Geronimo, which allows you to deploy JBI components and services directly into Geronimo. ServiceMix is being JBI certified as part of the Geronimo project. ServiceMix is also integrated with JBoss application server.

Virtuas has extensive domain expertise in ServiceMix, Geronimo and JBoss, and can provide the services necessary to bring them safely and successfully into your environment.