Enterprise service buses: disruptive technology or ready to come of age?(Masterclass)

Enterprise services buses (ESBs) have received a lot of attention in the past year, and this has been intensified by IBM's decision to add such capabilities to WebSphere. However, actual adoption remains low and some observers believe ESBs are overhyped. They are the natural heirs of several other technologies for integrating diverse applications on different platforms, from 1990s middleware through enterprise application integration (EAI), itself overhyped as the technology slump hit.

But EAI was one of the most pressing needs of a world where companies needed to inte