Sidebar: Get on the bus: More information about enterprise service bus technology.

Computerworld - The following are sources of additional information about enterprise service bus technology.
Book
Enterprise Service Bus, by David Chappell (O'Reilly Media Inc., 2004; 247 pages, paperback, $39.95). This is a good place to start if you want a basic-and-beyond understanding of ESBs. The author provides a foundation-level introduction to ESB technology, including plenty of context about the nascent ESB market and the state of enterprise application integration in general. The book also provides enough granular detail, practical advice and case studies to make it worth the time of IT professionals who are already familiar with ESB technology. Chappell works for ESB vendor Sonic Software Inc. as its technology evangelist, but his book is relatively slant-free and is the best comprehensive treatment of the topic we've seen.

Resources on the Web
Here are a few of the best of the abundant information resources available online.
"Best of Breed ESBs" (download PDF) by Steve Craggs, vice chairman, Integration Consortium
Rather than ranking products in this white paper, Craggs outlines the crucial features he (and users) should be looking for in ESBs.

"Early Riders"
Computerworld, Nov. 3, 2003
Connie Winkler provides an early look at ESBs and some of the first corporate passengers on the enterprise service bus.

QuickStudy: SOA
Computerworld, March 1, 2004
Russell Kay offers a primer on how all service-oriented architectures work. He includes ESBs as a subset of SOAs and notes that both concepts have been around long before the recent hype about them. The article provides a foundation of information from which to judge new claims about the technologies.

Loosely Coupled
This Web site bills itself as providing news, commentary, resources and services for planning, deploying and managing loosely coupled business process automation. A useful source of information about SOAs and ESBs.