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An early draft review of the JSR-208 a.k.a. JBI (Java Business Integration) is available for download. In a nutshell:

"JBI seeks to address this problem [vendor-specific integration soup] by creating a standards-based architecture for integration solutions, allowing third-party components to be assembled by the end user."

The key high-level constructs of JBI are:

• An environment is a container that provides a normalized WSDL-based messaging service ("NMS"), deployment, (re)configuration, deployment, and management.
• A service engine ("SE") is a "business logic driver". (This is where WS-BPEL fits into JBI.)
• A binding component ("BC") is a bridge between the internal normalized messaging service of the JBI environment and external protocols such as HTTP or JMS.

In terms of a WS-BPEL process living in a JBI environment, the process would be deployed in a SE that can execute WS-BPEL processes againt the NMS, and the concrete bindings for partnerLinks would be BC implementations.

One of the reasons that I'm excited about JBI is a little bit selfish: the portable runtime container that we built for PXE is similar to a JBI environment, so we've already been working in these terms for over a year... PXE will be available as a JBI component as soon as there are implementations that can host it.

On a walk with my wife Friday night, I was struck by the number of optometrists crammed into one stretch. Perhaps my neighborhood is just full of myopic people, but it is a well-known fact that the best place to put a Burger King is across the street from a McDonald's. This got me thinking about the ESB and product marketing in the service-oriented architecture space.

Being first is good, e.g., “first-mover advantage”, if people know where you're going. I think that the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), a term coined by Gartner for one of Sonic Software's products, is going to turn out to be an interesting case study, since, as Dave Chappell points out, it seems to be turning into a legitimate product category with the in-kind entry of IBM and WebMethods. (A messaging bus itself is not new: the first three letters in TIBCO are an acronym for The Information Bus, software that was developed in the mid-1980's and whose commercialization formed the basis for TIBCO's products.)

The question of the moral higher ground in the ESB space is moot: with a concise definition, a burger is a burger, so decide whether you want it flame-broiled, prefer a bundle with industry-leading fries, or would rather spend three times as much to get it on a plate with table service. (If you ask me, the best burgers on the planet are served at a tavern in Portland, OR.)

While I haven't decided what I think of ESBs as an architectural construct, we need more concrete concepts like the ESB as a means of customer education and categorization. In my non-MBA's view of software product marketing, any marketing message boils down to, in no particular order, who it's for, what it is, why it's necessary, and how it's used.

The challenge for vendors in the service-oriented architecture space is to create more burgers.