ESB: Typical tasks

- Transports
Transportation of the messages
- Messaging
Allowing asynchronous and synchronous messaging.
- Security
Application that wants access to the bus must authenticate and must get authorization for the requested operation.
- Datatransformations
A message of data model A is transformed into data model B without losing content.
- Service locator
On receive of a message the bus identifies / locates the service of an application to be called.
- Interceptors
After processing messages at certain stages processing can be intercepted by configured service calls - e.g. allowing realization of cross-cutting concerns.
- Protocol bindings
The bus allows forwarding requests from one endpoint to another one. Not changing the message at all or enriching or transforming it.
- Service model

Sources that will  / should be connected to the bus:
- Web services
- Queues
- Portals
- File / FTP / ...
- BPEL

Systems that would / should be connected to the bus:
- business applications
- mobile devices
- partners
- browsers
- rich clients