Mule and ESB

So, I’ve recently stumbled on the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and, more specifically, Mule. I’m doing research into application integration and poking around the various information sources on MOMs, I ran into this ESB concept. Then, I was browsing through the books at Borders and happened upon a new Oreilly book on the subject.

I’m not sure I’ve gotten the full picture yet, and I’m sure that the commercial offerings are probably quite a bit different from Mule, but what I see so far is appealing. We already have one in house system devoted to cross-system EDI between our internal lab systems and our external customers systems. A lot of what I see in Mule looks like a generalization of the same ideas.