8 Replies Latest reply on Mar 23, 2007 6:49 AM by marklittle

    CICS gateway

    tnfink

      In our company we are considering to implement a CICS connector/gateway for an Open Source ESB. I briefly checked the documentation of the JBoss ESB and could not find a short description on how to do this.

      Can somebody point me to short description on how to add a new gateway?
      Or would this be too difficult in the current state of the JBoss ESB?

        • 1. Re: CICS gateway
          kurtstam

          It should not be too difficult to do this. It should be one extra class really. You can take look at one of the existing gateways (i.e JMS). If you're interested we can start discussing implementation details on this thread. Next week should be a good week to start that. We always love to have contributors!

          Cheers,

          --Kurt

          • 2. Re: CICS gateway
            tnfink

            I browsed a little bit through the sources. First I was a little bit confused because I looked at the implementation of JMSCourier. There is a lot of configuration hardcoded in TwoWayCourierImpl and the XSD parsing looks frightening.

            But for adding a gateway I just have to implement one class, e.g. CICSGatewayListener, and I have to add a gateway configuration in XML which points to that class. All the XML parsing is done by JBoss ESB and I do not have to cope with the Courier-classes because they are only for internal, ESB-aware messages.

            Is this right?

            • 3. Re: CICS gateway
              tnfink

              I checked the JMSGatewayListener again and could find no code for sending a JMS message only for receiving. This makes sense for a listener, but does this mean that I have to create also a CICSCourier for sending messages?

              • 4. Re: CICS gateway
                marklittle

                I think what you're after is a reverse gateway?

                • 5. Re: CICS gateway
                  tnfink

                  Maybe, I am not sure :-)

                  I thought a gateway is bidirectional.
                  It can receive messages from the external system, adapt it to the internal ESB format, and delegate it to the configured action/service. But it is also capable of accepting internal messages from the ESB and forward them to the external system.

                  Is this assumption wrong?

                  If so, do I need to add some kind of "sender service" that sends messages to a CICS host and use a gateway only for receiving messages?

                  • 6. Re: CICS gateway
                    estebanschifman

                    Let's see if we can clarify.

                    Currently, gateways are inbound only. They are supposed to obtain any object (file, JMS message, etc.), package it as an ESB message, and send it to an EPR where a 'message aware listener' will pick it up, and pass it to an ActionProcessingPipeline.

                    Once you are in the pipeline, any outgoing arbitrary object (arbitrary in the sense that it does not need to be an esb message), can be produced in any (user) action class, either by the method speficied in the 'process' attribute (default is process(Message) method), or in the method specified in the (optional) 'okMethod ' property for normal completion, or in the method specified in the (also optional) 'exceptionMethod' property

                    A generic example of how to do this is:

                     <actions>
                     <action name="outboundObject" class="mypackage.MyClass" process="step1, step2,step3">
                     <property name="okMethod" value="mySuccessMethod" />
                     <property name="exceptionMethod" value="myFailureMethod" />
                     </action>
                     </actions>
                    

                    This example has only one action class in the pipeline, but it invokes three methods in sequence: step1, step2 and step3. Signature of these three is Message stepX(Message) throws Exception
                    If the 'process' attribute were not included, the default is to invoke the Message process(Message) method in the action class.
                    If at any point, the sequence of steps throws an Exception, and the property with name 'exceptionMethod' was specified (as in our example), then the corresponding method will be invoked (signature: void xxxxx(Message, Throwable))
                    If the sequence runs successfully (no Exceptions thrown), and the property with name 'okMethod' was specified (as in our example), then the corresponding method will be invoked (signature void zzzzz(Message))

                    An 'outbound gateway' can be implemented simply by implementing methods for success and failure with the proper signatures, and specify them in the 'okMethod' and 'exceptionMethod' properties of the action class.

                    I hope this helps.


                    • 7. Re: CICS gateway
                      tnfink

                      Thanks a lot for your explanation. I think I understand the architecture now. We will start to implement a small sample application and if there are any problems or successes I will post them.

                      Best regards,

                      Torsten

                      • 8. Re: CICS gateway
                        marklittle

                        Thanks Torsten. If you come up with anything that you think would be of wider use to the JBossESB community and want to contribute it back, let us know.