Steve Vinoski's Blog

In a comment to the many comments on my post entitled “The ESB Question,” Bill de hÓra gets it right:

I’m disappointed with the responses here. Steve’s an expert technologist in this domain. There’s a real opportunity for learning when the ESB approach is *appropriate* – instead we see the same old reactionary web v enterprise positioning and the usual suspect arguments being rolled out against REST style integration.

Bill’s right; the discussion has unfortunately mostly degenerated into the usual no-light-all-heat “us vs. them” argument. I especially object to the folks who twist what I say and accuse me of saying things that I never even remotely hinted at, but I guess that’s the price of blogging publicly.

I’m not going to try to address the comments individually, especially the ones from the guys who, amusingly, wrote lengthy diatribes explaining to me just what ESBs are, what they’re supposed to do, and why they’re beneficial. Yes, guys, I get all that. Perhaps you should go back and read some of my publications from 3, or 4, or 5 years ago? Funny how I don’t recall any of you being around back then, when I felt more positive about ESBs (hint, it was before that term was coined) and I was blogging and writing to that effect.

Arguing this issue on technical merits is rather pointless. One of the best comments in this thread was from Dan Hatfield:

Honestly, I see the ESB as primarily a political thing. It allows for a greater degree of control on delivered solutions. In large companies, we don’t often do architecture – we do politecture…The politics drive the architecture. Not the way it should be…but that’s the way it is.

So true, so true. Another non-technical way to look at it is from the viewpoint of Clayton Christensen’s classic book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. For quite a few years now, we’ve seen a series of sustaining innovations in the “object/service RPC” line of descent originally popularized by CORBA and COM, both of which built on earlier RPC, distributed object, and TP monitor technologies. RMI, EJB, SOAP, WS-*, and ESB are all offspring in that line, and there are surely more to come. I feel that REST, on the other hand, fits the definition of a disruptive innovation perfectly (and if you’re too lazy to read the book, then please at least follow the link, otherwise you won’t understand this at all). The proponents of the sustaining technologies look at REST and say, “well it can’t solve this and it can’t solve that” and voice numerous other complaints about it, precisely as Christensen predicts they would. But Chistensen also explains why, at the end of the day, any real or perceived technical shortcomings simply don’t matter (and in this case, they’re mostly perceived, not real). HTTP-based REST approaches have a lower barrier to entry and are less complex than anything the sustaining technologies have to offer, and REST is disrupting them, whether all the smart folks pushing ESBs like it or not. It’s not a technical issue, and there’s no amount of technology the non-REST tribe can throw at it to stop it because it’s based on how markets work, not on the technical specifics.

At the end of the day, if you don’t think REST is viable or you don’t like dynamic languages, then don’t use them. It just means that you’re at a different point than I am on the Technology Adoption Lifecycle curve. Like I already said in my first follow-up, I’m not in that business anymore, so it doesn’t matter to me at all. I’ll just keep using what I know to be generally superior to all the other approaches I’ve worked on over the years.