Combining Service-Oriented Architecture and Event-Driven Architecture using an Enterprise Service Bus

Today’s business applications rarely live in isolation. They need to be connected in order to create an integrated solution from which an organization can derive value. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) are two different paradigms that address complex integration challenges. How can organizations choose the better approach to meet their needs? Actually they don’t have to choose: an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) allows for the implementation of both the SOA and the EDA concepts.

Read the complete article by Jean-Louis Maréchaux, IT Architect, IBM.

One Response to "Combining Service-Oriented Architecture and Event-Driven Architecture using an Enterprise Service Bus"

Jack van Hoof says:

August 29, 2006 at 1:38 pm

Events happening in the real world should be the starting point of a SOA-design. Real-world events are the triggers for the business processes by nature. We at Dutch Railways promote to start with modelling the events. We describe events in canonical formats and we publish the events in a “global dataspace” (implemented by an ESB). We use web services interface technology and an ESB to publish these events and to consume them. In our opinion SOA starts with recognizing the real-world events (what to react on) that will be the basis for defining generic functional building blocks to compose SOA’s (how to react; the process). It’s a kind of contract-first design.

Modelling events is what we call an event-driven architecture (EDA). EDA has affinity with business processes and SOA has affinity with application construction. Taking into account that the EDA approach is an inverse of the well known SOA approach you might say the two paradigms are complements by nature. The layer between the real-world events and artificial IT-systems (SOA) is an EDA.

It’s the way we obtain the alignment of our business and the supporting IT-systems.

Read more…

Jack van Hoof
Enterprise Integration Architect at Dutch Railways