ESB as a service fabric supports integrating multiple services and component types. Hence, from the consumer perspective, they see a pure services interface with all SOA qualities. This chapter demonstrated how the same principles helped us to expose an EJB service as a firewall-friendly web service. The notable thing here is the ease with which an ESB framework does this—and that is where the right tools will help to solve even non trivial problems easily. So, instead of holding the ESB hammer and looking at every IT problem as a nail, use ESB and JBI to solve appropriate integration problems following SOI guidelines alone. Most component frameworks available today allow even POJO components to be exposed as services so that they can be consumed remotely. This is a lightweight approach compared to the traditional EJB programming paradigm.

In the next chapter, we will look into this concept to understand how we can expose an annotated POJO as services in the ESB.