SOA Guerrilla (Jim Webber) , ESB and SOA

Jim Webber explains here http://jim.webber.name/2007/10/17/2ae26134-ea19-43de-9a75-d5ef62c0e5b4.aspx
the dangers on why you should not burry your integration, transformation etc in the ESB. (Well why you should not use a proprietary ESB). I myself I am not against it of having an ESB but you should follow standards to stop vendor lock in (BPEL) for system to system processes, and just use the ESB to simplify the management of your SLA (QoS), temporary contract resolution and management of policies, and even addressing. (its just a tool!)

Using standards on web services like WCF and WSIT you can achieve things like policy, reliable messaging, transaction support etc, but nevertheless the ESB will help you on said maintainability.

The majors risk is that the ESB sometimes won’t manage to comply as quick with new standards as development tools (You can overcome this by temporarily bypassing the bus until these are available)… and don’t forget that you will need good governance to don’t replicate or create new spaghetti.

And remember the 4 tenets of SOA: http://www.bpminstitute.org/articles/article/article/the-four-tenets-of-service-orientation.html