Best of this Week Summary 16 December - 23 December 2007

• Nice set of 10 lessons learned from designing and building a high transaction database (Microsoft SQL Server). The system was required to support 35K tps.
  


• Reasonable comparison of 3 open source applicationservers: JBoss 4.2, Geronimo 2 and Tomcat 6. Geronimo comes out as most complete. Tomcat is a bit odd in this comparison, it is more a servlet/web-container than a full applicationserver. Glassfish for example would have fitted better here. Here's some The ServerSide feedback on it.
  


• In this article Paul Fremantle discusses the fundamentals of the Enterprise Service Bus concept. His point is that the model of ESB sometimes might be converting into an anti-SOA pattern: the conversion of the formats happens in the ESB instead of happening at the service providers (the endpoints). Thus you would need a central ESB team that needs to deal with each application, its format and protocol the ESB needs to interface with. Note that the author is owner of the WSO2 ESB, his company and also works on Apache Synapse. As he claims these tools are designed from the ground up to match the original idea of SOA: the owners of the services take responsibility to define a clean and simple interface.