Design of a communication infrastructure for GUISET services based on multiple enterprise service buses

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Date
2013
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University of Zululand
Abstract
In recent years, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become a paradigm for enabling more efficient and flexible business processes in a service-based economy. The significance of this paradigm results in many organizations moving their businesses and making them available as online services so that they can be accessed ubiquitously by anyone connected to the network. The idea is to increase level of resource sharing and collaboration among geographically dispersed individuals/organizations. One of the successful SOA implementation that has recently received a lot of attention is the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). ESB provides a key infrastructure that support guaranteed event handling, durable messaging, and data transformation capabilities that are needed by SOA environments. The success of ESB resulted in many ESB products being implemented and offered as both commercial and open source integration solutions. However, these products offer different approaches towards achieving ESB capabilities. Therefore, selecting the most suitable ESB becomes a challenging task, not only because there are many factors to consider in this selection, but also owing to the relationships between these factors and requirements of a particular integration scenario. There are many research efforts that have attempted to assist in ESB selection. They only consider evaluation of ESB products against given integration requirements. These evaluations are only useful when there is an ESB product that best support all the integration requirements of a given environment. This is hardly the case because ESBs perform well in some capabilities and worst in others. It is, therefore, believed that multiple ESBs can be integrated to get the best of individual ESBs that can give better performance compared to a single ESB. On the backdrop of the foregoing, this work considered GUISET integration requirements and investigated the validity of the above mentioned belief by integrating multiple ESBs to work together as a federation. Federation of ESBs allows each ESB to be used for the capability it best supports. Key capabilities investigated in this study are Service Discovery and Composition. An investigation was carried to find out which among the three (3) ESBs (ServiceMix, Mule and JBoss) considered best supports each of the afore-mentioned capabilities. The results showed that ServiceMix has the best support for Service Composition while JBoss has the best support for Service Discovery. These findings were then used for empirical evaluation of Directly Connected, Hub-Spoke and Brokered ESB Federation patterns, with each ESB providing the capability it best supports to the federation. Directly Connected ESB federation pattern outperformed the other patterns. We then compared the performance of Directly Connected ESB Federation and ServiceMix ESB to determine whether ESB federation has better performance compared to a single ESB. The results showed that ESB federation has better performance in terms of response time and throughput compared to a single ESB.
Description
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science and Agriculture in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2013
Keywords
service oriented architecture --Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) --GUISET --communication
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