Before the emergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA), the term middleware would often be equated with an application server (Footen and Faust 162). However, today with the degree of progress on service-oriented architecture the term middleware will often be equated with Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This is because if the application server is the foundation for middleware then ESB represents the largest and most important part of middleware in Service Oriented Architecture. According to Footen and Faust, “ESB is a term used to describe a wide variety of products whose primary goal is to extend the simple messaging capabilities of an application server to allow the inclusion of enterprise functionality needed to support SOA” (162). It has also been observed that a major difference between ESB and middleware is the fact that ESB is Service-Oriented whereas middleware has functions that are applicable outside the realm of services in a distributed system (Footen and Faust 163). The ESB can accomplish business communication by implementing one of many communication models. An SOA enterprise may need to send a single message to many recipients who may be operating on various systems. Given that confidentiality and security are essential when sending data over a public channel the sender may require confirmation of delivery even under the most extreme conditions (Footen and Faust 164). Businesses have begun to combine application servers such as CORBA to integrate web applications to existing systems for greater productivity in e-commerce (Gibson 65). Common Object request broker architecture or CORBA acts as an application server with the main objective being to support communication between distributed objects (Flenner 114). The CORBA interface takes things a step further is step to make distributed systems integrate and operate. The CORBA interface performs this task by abstracting network communication and programming languages that are useful for an object to object interaction. The CORBA system has become fairly well recognized when industries such as telecommunications started to rely on the system as the integration glue for distributed systems. In addition to the above use of an advanced application server that can allow for communication between distributed systems another useful part of ESB is the use of various advanced database resources. The system has been described in a manner that indicates the use of a Microsoft SQL server for storing information on products and sales. One major advantage that comes with the use of advanced database products is the access to some stored procedures (Guerrero and Rojas 246). These are useful in that they can be used to encapsulate and enforce business rules in stored data. This is especially useful because once created these procedures can be stored and used to reproduce a data at any time thus reducing the time taken to synthesize data and provide useful results (Guerrero and Rojas 246). Further advantages that the system can find accessible via SOAP-based back-end interface include improved security (Townsend, Riz and Schaffer 182). With this interface in place, none of the standard methods for security will be used. Instead a SOAP message is used to transfer the required set of crede