Agent-Design Patterns for Building Distributed Service Bus Applications

Another blog that is several months late, but as usual, better late than never. I am currently preparing my presentation for tomorrow's Real World SOA: Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference I finally made the time to read Danny Garber's paper on Agent-Design Patterns and it was well worth the read. Danny introduces the notion of a Distributed Service Bus (I think I have also heard him refer to it as an Internet Service Bus) allowing multiple organizations to collaborate on extremely complex business processes.

As with most business processes, these are subject to service unavailability errors, message translation and enrichment requirements, but because they span multiple organizational boundaries must also worry about routing across perimeter networks and error recovery in remote domains. Danny talks about how he has used a combination of Microsoft's ESB Guidance (predominantly the Itinerary pattern) and the Microsoft Global Practices Managed Service Engine (predominantly for routing across perimeter networks) to provide the DSB capability.