Research Trends in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Applications: A Systematic Mapping Study

In recent years, enterprise service bus (ESB) has become a favorable adoption as a technology category in the IT industry as it provides secure and guaranteed delivery of services. The elasticity of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) enables numerous applications to exchange information makes it a significant middleware layer responsible for transferring information in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). ESB is presently the utmost promising tactic for the integration of business applications in distributed and diverse environments. It also offers essential infrastructure support for transforming messages or data, intelligent routing, and protocol transformation. The idea of ESBs emerged from the requirements to move out from traditional integration patterns, that becomes difficult to manage with the passage of time. Our study aim is to understand and provide ongoing research topics, challenges and future directions concerning ESB applications. A systematic mapping study (SMS) is therefore implemented to categorize the selected papers into the following classification: contribution type, ESB applications, research type and their approaches. We have extracted a total of twenty-two papers for this systematic study and they are classified according to defined criteria. The findings of this SMS are discussed and researchers were provided with suggestions on possible directions for future research.