The issue of defining an ESB, or enterprise service bus, arose again during a panel session at the InfoWorld SOA Forum in San Jose, Calif. on Thursday.Having just written an article about this issue last week, I was a bit surprised that ESB turned out to be such a prime focus of the panel, commissioned to discuss definitions of the SOA platform. After officials at two ESB makers, Cape Clear CEO Annrai O’Toole and Sonic Software CTO Gordon Van Huizen, touted ESB, Graham Glass, CTO of webMethods, said he did not like the term, bus, because he associated it too much with messaging. “I tend to view the bus as primarily the messaging, the plug-in point,” Glass said. O’Toole said the most important function an ESB can provide is to mediate between the Internet and the enterprise. An ESB enables publishing of service points from the structured world to the unstructured world, he said. But Glass responded, “The Internet’s actually full of mediation already.” So, the ESB debate rages on. O’Toole also said the industry does not need more Web services standards. “The number of actual working Web services standards that people are actually incorporating into their products is miniscule,” compared to the volume of standards that have arisen, O’Toole said. Besides ESB, the concepts of UDDI directories and the Semantic Web and RDF also drew sharp opinions.Glass said UDDI is a standard registry for services but is hard to use. He then called the Semantic Web and RDF the only standards for reporting data on the Web. “Oh, no. Don’t bring that up,” responded Eric Newcomer, CTO at Iona.“I have to say UDDI is just broken. It’s just not going to do that job that we needed it to do,” Newcomer said. UDDI was designed for Internet-based searching and for commercial B2B usage. UDDI does not have the right structure for enterprise deployments of Web services, Newcomer said when interviewed following the panel session.RDF and the Semantic Web, meanwhile, are focused on ontology and categorization, said Newcomer. Categorizaton is a problem that is years from being solved, he said. Later on during another panel session, industry executives discussed plumbing issues pertaining to building applications for SOA, pondering topics such as messaging, Web services and declarative vs. procedural programming.“The line between procedural and declarative is blurring away,” said Edwin Khodabackchian, vice president of product development at Oracle. Another panelist, Tim Ewald, Web services architect at Mindreef, expressed a desire for improved XML-based programming. “One thing that would be nice to do is start to have rules-based processing that works on the structure of the XML code,” Ewald said. O’Toole, who served on both panels. panned DCOM and COM technologies, then apologized to panelist John Shewchuk, project manager for the Indigo architecture at Microsoft, which developed COM and DCOM. O’Toole said these technologies did not provide the link between business and technology persons in the way that XML and SOA have. Shewchuk pointed out the newness of the SOA and Web services-based systems. “We’re at the beginning stage of an industry where we’ve got a new way to string together applications and it’s going to take us a little while,” to forge agreement on issues such as eventing, Shewchuk said. Given the flurry of tech talk at both sessions, IT manangers and developers should have their hands full grasping these new technologies intended to make their lives easier. Technology Industry