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What is SAP ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)?

Former Member
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Hi fellow sdners gurus… I have been reading threads about SAP SOA and ESB.

I do not want to start a debate on wether XI is an ESB, but more of a statement to what is SAP ESB (if XI it is, then be it).

1) What is SAP ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) today (I could not find a clear answer to is)?

2) Who uses this SAP ESB in production currently and what kind of environment (i.e. strictly SAP backend systems, or combination of various vendors’ backend systems)?

Can someone share some light on this topic?

As a reminder, an ESB is expected to exhibit the following characteristics (source Wikipedia):

• It is usually operating-system and programming-language agnostic; for example, it should enable interoperability between Java and .NET applications.

• It uses XML (eXtensible Markup Language) as the standard communication language.

• It supports web-services standards.

• It supports various MEPs (Message Exchange Patterns) (e.g., synchronous request/response, asynchronous request/response, send-and-forget, publish/subscribe).

• It includes adapters for supporting integration with legacy systems, possibly based on standards such as JCA

• It includes a standardized security model to authorize, authenticate and audit use of the ESB.

• To facilitate the transformation of data formats and values, it includes transformation services (often via XSLT or XQuery) between the format of the sending application and the receiving application.

• It includes validation against schemas for sending and receiving messages.

• It can uniformly apply business rules, enriching messages from other sources, the splitting and combining of multiple messages and the handling of exceptions.

• It can provide a unified abstraction across multiple layers

• It can route or transform messages conditionally, based on a non-centralized policy (i.e. no central rules-engine needs to be present).

• It is monitored for various SLA (Service Level Agreement) threshold message latencies and other SLA characteristics.

• It (often) facilitates "service classes," responding appropriately to higher and lower priority users.

• It supports queuing, holding messages if applications are temporarily unavailable.

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Jean-Michel

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

Former Member
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hi,

short answer: (afaik) officially there is no such thing called SAP ESB.

to what extent PI 'can' be considered an ESB remains to be judged by the interested reader.

regards,

anton

Answers (3)

Answers (3)

Former Member
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Hello All,

It seems the PI is the part of ESB(Enterprise Service Bus). The ESB  as service is a architecture to integrate with kinds of third-party system(JAVA, .NET and so on)  for Enterprise.

How to understand SAP eSOA(ESB,SCA,JBI) with PI and PO?

Please share some ideas.

Many thanks & best regards,

Hubery

Former Member
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PI or XI is the ESB from SAP side. PI is not a full pledged ESB on a reference model of ESB idea but it is the the framework SAP provide as a ESB product.

A Standard Based ESB Reference Model should fullfil the following features in a framework.

ESB Features Service Enablement Phase (1, 2, 3)

1) Message brokering between heterogeneous environments

2) Supports asynchronous, synchronous, publish and subscribe messaging

3) Supports synchronous and asynchronous bridging

4) Supports message formats of SOAP

5) Support for message format of SOAP with attachments

6) Support for xml message

7) Support for structured non-XML data

8) Support for raw data message

9) Support for text data message

10) Sport for e-mail with attachment message

11) Heterogeneous transports between service end points

12) Supports for FILE protocols

13) Supports for FTP protocols

14) Supports for HTTP protocols

15) Supports for HTTPS protocols

16) Supports for Multiple JMS providers

17) Supports for RMI protocols

18) Supports for web service protocols

19) Supports for CORBA protocols

20) Supports for DCOM protocols

21) Supports for E-mail (POP, SMTP, IMAP) protocols

22) Support for advanced transformation engine

23) Support for configuration-driven routing

24) Message routing based policies

25) Support for call-outs to external services to support complex routing

26) Support for point-to-point routing

27) Support for one-to-many routing scenarios

28) Support for request response model

29) Support for publish-subscribe models

30) Service monitoring

31) Service logging

32) Service auditing with search capabilities.

33) Support for capture of key statistics for message and transport attributes including message invocations, errors, and performance, volume, and SLA violations.

34) Supports clusters and gathers statistics across the cluster to review SLA violations

35) Support for service provisioning

36) Support deployment of new versions of services dynamically through configuration

37) Migrates configured services and resources between design, staging and production

38) Supports multiple versions of message resources that are incrementally deployed with selective service access through flexible routing

39) Configurable policy-driven security

40) Supports the latest security standards for authentication, encryption-decryption, and digital signatures

41) Supports SSL for HTTP and JMS transports

42) Supports multiple authentication models

43) Policy-driven SLA enforcement

44) Establishes SLAs on a variety of attributes including

a. Throughput times

b. Processing volumes

c. Success/failure ratios of message processes

d. Number of errors

e. Security violations

f. Schema validation issues

45) Initiates automated alerts or enables operator-initiated responses to rule violations using flexible mechanisms including

a. E-mail notifications

b. Triggered JMS messages

c. Triggered integration processes with a JMS message

d. Web services invocations with a JMS message

e. Administration console alerts.

46) Support for having multiple LOBs manage their own service bus based on their policies, and a service bus at an enterprise level that could act as a broker for sharing services across the various business units.

47) Support for agent plug-in to support following features

48) External provider’s service access for security

49) External provider’s service management

50) External provider’s transaction container

a. External provider’s business orchestration (BPEL Engine) and business work flow service container

51) Transaction support on message level

52) IDE Integration

53) Open standards

Former Member
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without kind permission from

<a href="http://colab.cim3.net/file/work/SOACoP/2007_05_0102/SOAPGuide/SOAPGPart2.pdf">this source</a> (p.30)

and with unreasonable re-rendering/numbering.

regards, anton

Message was edited by:

Anton Wenzelhuemer

Former Member
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<u><b>Shaji,</b></u>

Please mention "<b>SOA Practitioners’ Guide Part 2: SOA Reference Architecture</b>" as the source of your reply, and give credit to<i><b> Surekha Durvasula</b></i> , the Enterprise Architect, Kohls; as suggested by <b>Anton</b> who reported this.

I wish you had referred to the wonderful diagrams in the same article for further study.

<u><b>Anton:</b></u>

The loss of formatting while copying from PDF is not really that unusaul, but Shaji re-numbered the items failry well.

Former Member
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I will put the reference specs on next posting. I am a person travel Moday to Thur, working any where in the world. I started posting things in SAP forum due to following reason.

1. I have worked as an EAI/J2EE/ESB/SOA Architect in more than 5 huge SAP implementation in the world.

2. I have worked in major software vendor's platform that include SAP, ORACLE, IBM, BEA and Open Source.

However when I deal with SAP technical guys in a project they always talk and deal with a project customization perspective than a full pledged SDLC guys. However when I started working with SAP tools and technology I felt it is smart like BWM and BENZ. However when I talk to SAP technical guys atleast in America I feel like they are repairing BENZ and BMW in local workshop.

For example, look into most people's answer here, they either cut and past links or some time vague answers without much technical supporting FACTS.

A lot of people beleiev here SOA is some kind of tools, procedure etc. The document you mentioned here is an Agile work product to address ESB as a framwork than a product. I did not format that or cut and pasted, I have a copy of that in a word document in my laoptop if anybody asked me a reference model of ESB i give that feature list, also it is not just from one source as you think, it is again further purified by open source ESB framework such as Mule.

So what is your point??

As long as the person who need a clarification and if I could able to communicate that without touching with any vendor;s product and if the question is relevant to an architecture related issues such as SOA I am happy.

For your information next time i will put signature of the source buddy.

Former Member
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I appreciate you contribution and wealth of knowledge. I also recognize the efforts it takes to give some directions to a person not really familiar with a subject.

I agree with you when you embed the replies, instead of just the hyperlinks. Additionally, it is sometimes helpful for users, who want to dig deep into, to access the entire articles with all the diagrams for better understanding. Therefore, whenever possible, it is a good ideal to embed hyperlinks on top of quoting the relevant material.

sbhutani1
Contributor
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Hi,

Refer this thread

Regards

Sumit Bhutani