As some of you might now, I work for an incredible professional services organization. In addition to being a premier Microsoft managed partner, we are also the ISV behind a product called Neuron ESB. This will be the first of a series of posts to commemorate this important release.
Neuron is an enterprise service bus which provides a physical and logical integration back bone for distributed applications and services with very low latency.
Neuron takes a topical approach to connecting parties within a conversation. By using a topic based publish-subscribe architecture, organizational business domain is instantly aligned with the problem domain.
For example, if I have a smart client application that provides a user interface for submitting purchase orders, and a service boundary which processes the order, I may have at least 2 parties. In this scenario, the smart client and service boundary would discuss interesting events over a topic called "Orders". When a new order is submitted, it would be delivered via an assortment of transports to the subscribing service via the Orders topic. This is a powerful concept because it is likely that there may be more than one subscriber that may be interested in the purchase order. I intentionally chose "service boundary" instead of service to describe the receiver/server in the above example because the client has no idea how many services the subscriber behind the service boundary may compose. It is likely, however, that there is an inventory service, a fulfillment service, and a billing service. One approach would be for these services to be directly integrated behind a "purchase order service" that orchestrates the process. This approach may yield autonomy from the perspective of the client, but it also introduces undesirable coupling behind the service boundary. A publish-subscribe eventing fabric easily solves this problem. In a loosely coupled context, each service- inventory, fulfillment and billing- would also subscribe to the Orders topic. The ease of configuration and tremendous flexibility is a big boon to delivering the ROI that real-world SOA investments demand.
I'll let David "Dr." Pallman, the father of Neuron ESB share some of the incredible features that Neuron ESB 2.0 brings to bear: http://davidpallmann.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E95EF9DC3FDB978E!413.entry
You may also want to catch up with Sam Gentile, who has already posted a great article on the streamlined API that makes Neuron ESB so compelling.
Get it? Good. Get on the bus.