WebSphere ESB incorporates WebSphere Application Server, which provides a high performance, secure and manageable middleware container that supports standard J2EE application components, such as enterprise beans, Web services, servlets, JCA connectors, and asynchronous beans.
WebSphere ESB provides functions for the deployment and administration of service applications, including a browser-based administrative console, command scripting, topology management (of service buses, servers, and clusters), a set of standard management programming interfaces called JMX, and an administrative model encompassing all hosted application components and infrastructure.
The server infrastructure provides network I/O, queuing, scheduling, threading, and dispatching functions common to most middleware. It also supports various transports and protocols to relieve developers of coding protocol semantics and message encodings.
WebSphere ESB can augment and enhance an application by providing qualities of service as runtime capabilities that are normally difficult to implement. For example, requirements on the hosting container such as atomic transactions or a specific security role for the caller are expressed declaratively in a service’s metadata. Operational capabilities such as performance monitoring and measurement, workload routing, and workload management can be enabled administratively.
WebSphere ESB provides application runtime services that implement standard programming interfaces of the J2EE programming model; for example, application tracing and logging interfaces are integrated with those of the server runtime to provide a consistent view of problem diagnosis. Security interfaces extend WebSphere ESB security to address application-specific business needs. Name space services enable the discovery and binding of services, and can be persisted throughout the administrative domain.
A service implementation deployed in WebSphere ESB gains all of these advantages without the need to explicitly code them, nor to be aware of any of the server infrastructure.