Over the past couple of weeks, I have been working on nailing down some design for a service bus to add real-time capability to one of our applications. This has led to spending some time looking at nServiceBus as well as a few other examples. I’ve also been reading Enterprise Integration Patterns (Hohpe/Woolf) to understand some of the established patterns in the space.

It’s interesting to see the different approaches people take to things like transactions and message recovery. From my experience with health care transactions, there is no way to have a distributed transaction across the myriad of systems involved in a health care exchange. With no clear standards and hardly any real-time communication with insurance companies, auditing and electronic reconciliation are the only plausible methods of determining the state of each transaction.

The discussion is lively at the nServiceBus Yahoo Group, so if you have an interest in that style of integration, stop in and join the conversation.

Dru Sellers and I have started working on a simplified version of a service bus called MassTransit. It’s an open-source project, Apache 2.0 License, and could use some comments and/or contributions. We’re going at it with the simplified YAGNI approach to meet some specific needs for work-related projects. We’re also focusing on an easy to configure, easy to code approach to reduce the difficulty of building systems using message-based communication.

It’s an ongoing project to find the right solution for a real business problem, so we’ll see how it goes!