Teaser for an interesting book...
EAI - The Broader Perspective
No one should have (or will) ever dared to build a 'Single System' which will take care of the entire business requirements of an enterprise. Instead, we build few (or many) systems,and each of them takes care of a set of functionalities in a single Line of Business (LOB). There is absolutely nothing wrong here, but the need of the hour is that these systems have to exchange information and interoperate in many new ways which have not been foreseen earlier. Business grows, enterprise boundaries expands and mergers and acquisition are all norms of the day. If IT cannot scale up with these volatile environments, the failure is not far.
Mule is the leading open source ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and integration platform. It is a scalable, highly distributable object broker that can seamlessly handle interactions with services and applications using disparate transport and messaging technologies.
Apache ServiceMix is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that combines the functionality of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and an Event Driven Arthitecture (EDA) to create an agile, enterprise ESB.