This article is the fifth in a series dedicated to the ESB integration architecture. The initial article is located here.

Canonical Models

In a preceding article, I talked about 3 limitations of a traditional integration:

1. Lack of scalability and fault tolerance.
2. There are no economies of scale.
3. Sender and receiver are tied by a contract.

In my previous article, I presented Publish-Subscribe asynchronous messaging as a way to alleviate limitation #2 by leveraging topics mechanisms in which multiple receivers can subscribe for the same message, effectively allowing economies of scale when having to disseminate the same information across different systems.

In this article, I am going to discuss how to untie senders and receivers at the data level (schema and content), through the use of Canonical Models.

Defining canonical models allows enterprises to create business objects that are independent from any specific application or system. The model contains all data points required to holistically describe a business entity (e.g. an order, invoice, order status, etc.) to connect to all systems/partners.

Continue reading “Journey to an Enterprise Service Bus Integration – Part 5”