Before you start writing you own ESB ...

Vincent Partington recently wrote on his blog "before you start writing your own services and your own ESB, have a look at what's available." Vincent point out the challenges of migrating from a home-brew ESBs and recommends against a "not invented here" attitude. Reminds me of a dinner conversation in Winnipeg, Manitoba several years ago following my presentation of a new SOA Maturity Model to a group of local IT directors and executives. The gentleman next to me asked a simple question - of all the services in the world (SOA) which ones are the most important to do first? I was a bit set back by the question since I'd never had someone ask such a straight forward and obvious question. After chewing a bit on my dinner I admitted how profound it was and then suggested - file parsing, transformation, routing, and file writing were probably the services that everyone should invest in first. These are precisely the same set of services now offered out of the box - in both commercial and open source ESB (enterprise service bus) implementations. 

At Progress we've gone a step further to document larger enterprise integration patterns such as "batch to real-time" and "remote data distribution" on our developers network, and we also offer public code share libraries for users of Sonic ESB. So, long and short - consider downloading Sonic 7.6 and leveraging some of these prebuild integration services, code shares and higher level EAI patterns. I think you'll see that Vincent was right on the money with his advice, "...have a look at what's available."