eESB is an Enterprise Service Bus for exchanging data between the institutes of the German pension insurance. To connect the services within one institute EJB-Technology is used. The communication with external partners and between the different institutes of the German pension insurance is based on SOAP-WebServices. As data structure for the general communication the eXTra-Standard is used to address the responsible service applications.
The key features of the eESB are
- Distributing incoming requests to the service applications
- Single Point of Contact for internal and external communication
- Providing a monitoring for messages (e.g. for tracking)
- Ability to work with a high amount of small request as well as with requests with huge payloads and attachments
- Stability and availability of other service applications in case of failure in one single service application
- Adding, removing and maintaining service applications at runtime without redeployment of eESB
- Transaction based processing
- Support for different Application server (IBM WebSphere Application Server, JBoss EAP)
eESB uses the following technology: Java EE, SOAP-WebServices, Remote-EJB-calls. The solution reuses the SOAP-Standard by the W3C. It also uses the EJB-Standard defined at the Java-Specifications. For the data structure the eXTra-Standard of the AWV is used. The software is shared as as an installation file for free for the institues of the German pension insurance. There is currently no other license model.
The solution is currently installed at the data centers of NOW IT, Deutsche Rentenversicherung Rheinland-Pfalz and Baden Württemberg. The other eleven institutes of the German pension insurance are preparing the installation at the moment.
The solution’s technology is based on the libraries and frameworks all institutes of the German pension insurance agreed on. Also it is based on the eXTra-Standard which has been declared a German standard in communication in 2010 and is proctected.
The solution implements an Enterprise Service Bus within the German Pension Insurance with Datenstelle der Rentenversicherung (DSRV) at Würzburg beeing the central communication hub.
The eESB itself is ready to be used in a cluster and can be scaled to the needs of the computing center. Within the network of different eESBs new remote instances can be added easily.
The DSRV has the leading role in developing the eESB. The other institutes of the German pension insurance are involved in handing in feature requests.
The DSRV is developing and providing the application. The other institutes of the German pension insurance can hand in feature request and bug reports. After providing the release the new version has to be installed at the computing centres of the German Pension insurance by the responsible institutes. The DSRV also provides support for the institutes. For testing all computing centers are involved.
Communication between the institutes of the German pension insurance and external partners is standardized over the eXTra-Standard. The ways to transport the data can be reused with minor changes in the eXTra-Header to reach a new service application. The data of the procedures are not affected by the transport.