Inspired by great talk by Stefan Tilkov, we recently debated at TouK about concept of virtual ESB. The idea is to accept the fact that integration of many applications ends with some kind of spaghetti architecture. Even when you provide an ESB layer, which pretends to be a box with clear in and out dependencies, when you look inside it, you will see the same spaghetti as before.
The virtual ESB is then a set of common practices and conventions to integrate systems together, at an application level, even with no bus between.
OK, so you try to convince your application developers to implement some webservice-based integration with another application. And what's their response? 'Why to do that? We have now to generate some classes by our JAXB tools, made complex mappings to our domain classes, handle all that faults, etc. What about debugging, all that messy and unreadable XML messages, you cannot just set a breakpoint and evaluate some expression by our IDE...'
The suggestion of Stefan is to use REST instead of WS-* for integration. It's not always possible in a real world, so our answer is to switch from complex JAX-WS frameworks such as CXF to a lightweight, but powerful integration framework - Apache Camel. To avoid code generation and JAXB mappings and return to pure XML, which have great processing features. To use templating frameworks to generate XML responses. And to write mocks and unit tests, just like you do for your DAO and service layers.
