ESB (speaker John Davies)

I am sorry to say that all I wrote down about this session were bulletpoints, so I will just put them up here and if some annotations come to mind, I will add them.

• Message validation is critical, any wrong message can cost millions of money.
• Be future proof or in other words, use standards.
• Scalability is important, but only do it when it becomes necessary.
• Expect failure no matter what the vendors tell you.
• Integration within banks or outside is done on data and transport.
• HTTP is a unreliable transport and web services use it but why do we? We should not need something as WS-ReliableMessaging if HTTP was reliable.
• Using an ESB does not automatically imply the use of XML for messages.
• An ESB is best off to use one canonical message format internally which Biztalk fortunately does.
• In order to have the ESB do its best at performing the core services on messages, adapters should be used to offload stuff like validation, preprocessing and transformation to the clients of the ESB.

All in all, a very good introduction into what is important for a bank when it concerns the use of an ESB.