I was recently asked for my opinion on the role of transformation in enterprise service buses. The person requesting my opinon had come from an EAI background and was under the assumption that the ESBs with transformational capabilities were a better tool for integration. I explained to this person that with Services-Oriented Integration, many of the hurdles to integration that required the services of a big EAI hub were now being removed by the services, such as removal of proprietary formats, incompatible data types and interminable data structures. While there are still cases, mostly B2B, where one document type may need to be transformed into another completely different structure and gaps filled in, these types of requirements can now be satisfied by Business Process Management tools. In this type of environment, the ESB is responsible for ensuring enterprise qualities-of-service on behalf of the services. Therefore, transformation plays a much diminished role as part of an ESB.

Welcome to the SD West 2005 conference blog. We're hoping our impressions of the event will be opportunities for discussion and debate among readers and attendees, so feel free to comment. Note that the Software Development editorial team will be doing its usual coverage via our printed newspaper, SD Express, and the May and June issues of the magazine--so we'll be a bit spread thin. But as far as writing exercises go, this is a good one! The informal nature of the medium lends itself well, we think, to a conference--SD West tends to be more about opinions and techniques and less about actual breaking news. That said, we'll be sure to include coverage of the many tools and products we see. Stay tuned, and add your voice to the fray!