Enterprise Service Bus with USB-like Universal Ports

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an important and critical component of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) infrastructure. An ESB is used to connect applications to each other, which employ disparate forms of services to expose some or all of their functionalities. In the currently available ESBs, each application must connect to the ESB through a port of one specific type. This port type is determined by the communication protocol and message type used by an application. An example of protocol and message type is SOAP over HTTP, which is called a Web Service. In this paper, we describe a new, USB-like Universal Port type, which can be employed by an ESB. The Universal Port type will allow any application to connect to an ESB using any one of the Universal Ports, irrespective of the communication protocol or message format type used by the application. The simplification introduced by the Universal Ports in an ESB will allow scalability, ease of maintenance and updates, ease of extendibility to new communication protocols, use of multiple protocols by an application, and convenience of protocol switch any time by an application.