Now I know what an ESB is :-)

This is what I got to read from "Andreas Mueller" on this thread
http://www.theserverside.com/user/userthreads.tss?user_id=13939

What they mean is just a form of workflow, based on P2P. A service is listening on an input queue, processes a message, does some generic or specific transformation, calls an EIS or a Web Service, generates an output message and sends it to another queue which is input of another service and so on. So in fact, this is just plain workflow, based on messaging. The 'bus' is a logical term of a messaging infrastructure, connected by routing connections. It's just the ability to address queues, located wherever.

AJAX

Had been wondering what this new technology called AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) is.
This article explains very clearly what it is:
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2EE/AJAX/

Nice article on ERP

Have been hearing of this stuff called ERP, CRM etc. Knew about them at some abstract level but never was very clear until I stumbled on this nice piece of article on ERP.
http://www.cio.com/research/erp/edit/erpbasics.html
Ends the article with this note:-

The difficulty of getting ERP and e-commerce applications to work together—not to mention the other applications that demand ERP information such as supply chain and CRM software—has led companies to consider software known alternately as middleware and EAI software. These applications act as software translators that take information from ERP and convert it into a format that e-commerce and other applications can understand.