Can ESB/BPM allow to totally get rid of coding apart from wrapping webservices?

In a big company I work for, a very (costfull) ESB has been bought, the purpose is to be able to align with business goal quickly by resusing legacy infrastructure wrapping them with webservices, that is to say no more coding needed. Are ESB/BPM now really mature enough for that because it's now more than 10 years o开发者_运维百科ld or is it just an other vendor promise ?

Almost certainly just a vendor promise. If this becomes a reality for your company, they'll be the first to be so lucky!

This is the same sales job being done again and again for over a dozen years now (remember 4GLs?).

Most companies find the reality is that 1) it takes far more effort to install, integrate the ESB/BPM tool than they were led to believe, 2) only the most trivial changes can be made with the tool - it still takes coders to perform any meaningful process change / addition, 3) whenever the ESB/BPM tool vendor upgrades their tool, it's a huge effort to upgrade and be eligible for support (look into the history of any of these tools and what pains shops go through to upgrade, particularly Webmethods and BEA/Oracle's products over the years), 4) support services are expensive and rarely provide help (I know of companies that have paid for premium support who have filed dozens of tickets only to have one or two of them resolved by the idiots on the phone before someone in-house finally found the solution / work-around themselves.

You certainly can use an ESB / BPM to wrap legacy infrastructure and facilitate a migration towards a more modern target architecture. In fact that's one of the best reasons to adopt an ESB/SOA strategy in a complex application environment.

However, it's a complete fallacy to say that this implies "no more coding needed". After all, you will need to orchestrate a potentially complex sequence of web services with detailed knowledge of the state and transactional semantics of the legacy systems. Another word for that is.... coding.

p.s. It may be too late for you now but, for the sake of others reading this, I feel obliged to point out that costly prorprietary ESBs are often a waste of money. What you need can be done perfectly well (and sometimes even better!) by the open source solutions. JBoss and Mule spring immediately to mind. Since you are going to need to do most of the hard work in-house anyway, you might as well spend the time learning a great open source toolkit rather than locking yourself in to a vendor's proprietary solution.