VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago
Components in a system use “pipes” (HTTP/S, queues, etc…) to communicate with each other. Usually these pipes flow through an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) which does a number of things to the messages being passed between components.
It might do:
- Security checks
- Routing
- Business flow / validation
- Transformation
Once it’s completed these tasks the message will be forwarded onto the “endpoint” component. This is an example of “smart pipes” as lots of logic and processing reside inside the ESB (part of the system of “pipes”). The endpoints can then be “dumb” as the ESB has done all the work.
“Smart endpoints and dumb pipes” advocates the opposite scenario. That the lanes of communication should be stripped of business processing and logic and should literally only distribute messages between components. It’s then the components themselves that do processing / logic / validation etc… on those messages.
