2 Replies Latest reply on Oct 17, 2006 10:03 AM by derry

    General message receive functionality

    derry

      Hello!

      I am working for a company that does integration (besides other stuff) between buyers (>100) and suppliers (>800) for orders, change orders, order responses, invoices, ...
      What I have learned is that many smaller companies have problems programming to a specific interface (SOAP, simple HTTP request, ...) because their IT department is there to run their daily business. They have no staff that is dedicated to integration things. So far we have not found any commercial product that serves our needs. So we have a lot of automation in our products to come over this weaknesses.

      What we do is the following:
      * Try to find the envelope type of the message (SOAP, MML, MIME,...). This is based on regular expressions and XPATH queries. Then we disassemble the message based on this information.
      * Try to find what format the business documents have (xCBL, EDIfact, ebXML, ...). Again we use regular expressions and XPATH queries for that.
      * Try to find out what type of transaction (order, invoice, ...) this documents describe.
      * Convert the documents to a canonical format for further processing. But we always have the original format attached to the document for reference.
      * Look into the master-data registry (see below) if the communication partner is allowed to send a business document to the destination that is written inside the business document (we have many companies that send business documents on behalf of another company).
      * Push the documents to the right processing queue for the given type of transaction.

      To support the further processing we have a master-data registry that has all needed information about communication partners (for example their preferred outbound format)

      Is this something that is only needed by our company only or is this of general interest?

      If there is general interest I would love to design such a service with you together on top of JBossESB.

        • 1. Re: General message receive functionality
          marklittle

          This certainly sounds interesting. It has some cross-over with transformation services and content based routing. It would be interesting to discuss this further, but our roadmap for our first GA release is quite tight, so you would probably have to put up with some periods of silence from us during the conversations. Best place for them would be in this forum though.

          • 2. Re: General message receive functionality
            derry

             

            "mark.little@jboss.com" wrote:
            It would be interesting to discuss this further, but our roadmap for our first GA release is quite tight, so you would probably have to put up with some periods of silence from us during the conversations. Best place for them would be in this forum though.


            Don't worry Mark. This is an application that should run on top of JBossESB and other JBoss services, I think. So it is more a sub-project to JBossESB. I can put together some more thoughts in this forum the next days.