As someone who has dealt with NServiceBus, AppFabric, Windows Workflow, BizTalk and various IBM and Tibco piles of randomness etc, I have one word: nope.
The three phases of ESB are:
1. Optimism and ease of use. Much like your blog tutorial in rails, it lures you in and makes it look easy.
2. Then there's the deployment phase, where you realise it actually hurts. This happens the second deployment when contracts are updated etc and you enter contract versioning hell. There are contracts however loose your API says it is.
3. Paralysis. No one wants to change the messaging layer because the cost of doing so is unadulterated pain and friction, so everyone works around it.
This is all "in my experience" but that is perhaps unfortunately vast (several companies) and negative.
An alternative: I don't think there is one for large systems but don't get your hopes up until you've been using something for a couple of years.
Bring your passion and get involved at https://github.com/Warewolf-ESB/Warewolf-ESB
Step one is to turn off the typo correction to "Werewolf".
Step two is wade through the people who can't even spell "werewolf", e.g. "How can i become a warewolf? - Yahoo Answers"
We wrote a blog post on a similar thing: http://warewolf.io/ESB-blog/6-reasons-take-software-open-sou...
All in all, we like the open source approach - it's a great win all round and seems to be the future of tech.
