Is NServiceBus an ESB at all

Question

Is NServiceBus a ESB or lightweight ESB at all? or is it more like WCF with durable/ reliable messaging? It looks to me more like a messaging framework than ESB.

just wa

Answer 1

Your question is a little open ended. It would probably be better to outline what features you require from an ESB and then ask if NSB supports them.

UPDATE

I feed I ought to update my answer in response to Chris's answer.

Although convenient, it's erroneous and unhelpful to create two categories, Bus and Broker, such as Chris argues.

A service bus provides transport and platform neutral, mediated connectivity between services and their consumers. Under this definition, products which use the message broker model can also be used as a service bus.

An enterprise service bus provides this connectivity but can also add enterprise-grade mediation such as:

• Built in support for message exchange patterns
• Centralised monitoring
• Service load balancing and instancing
• Automated failure and exception management
• Service metadata discoverability
• Retry on failure
• ...and many more

I think therefore when you are choosing a tool set you should first of all decide which kinds of features you require and then you can choose the product which most fits your needs.