It is important to be clear about your processing requirements,
and to understand what you want IBM® App Connect Enterprise to
do for your business.
About this task
In a typical IT environment there
are many interacting components, each with a role to play, and it
is important that you are able to clearly define the role of IBM App Connect Enterprise in the broader environment.
A key design decision is how much business logic to implement within
your message flows. IBM App Connect Enterprise enables
you to implement large amounts of processing within a message flow,
and implementations can vary significantly from the simple routing
of messages to complex validation and transformation. Some implementations
also read data from a database and use that data to populate messages.
Regardless of the amount of function that you decide to implement
in a message flow, it is important to have clear boundaries between
pieces of application processing.
Several different processing
styles are commonly used with IBM App Connect Enterprise,
and it is important to understand the ones that are most relevant
to you, such as:
- Request Reply
- This is the most common type of processing, and enables two applications
to communicate, even if they use different data formats. For example,
a message flow transforms a request message from Application 1 into
a format that Application 2 can understand. The output of the first
message flow is then sent to Application 2, which processes the request
and issues a reply. The reply is processed in a second message flow,
which converts the response message into a format that Application
1 can understand.
- Aggregation
- This type of processing is often used to invoke one or more back-end
systems and coordinate replies. It is a more complex form of a Request
Reply case, in which all the replies from the intermediate applications
must be collected together before the reply message for the original
request can be sent. For example, this type of processing could be
used to book a holiday, in which a flight, hotel, and a car are required,
and all must be successfully processed before the holiday confirmation
can be sent.
- Routing
- Routing is used to redirect messages, and one or more copies of
a message can be sent to one or more destinations.
- Transformation
- This type of processing involves the use of one or more transformation
technologies such as Compute, JavaCompute, XMLT, or Mapping node.
In this type of processing the input message is processed according
to some business rules, and there might also be a change of message
format or protocol.
- File processing
- The use of files is one of the most common methods of storing
data. You can create message flows to process data in files, accepting
data in files as input message data, and producing output message
data for file-based destinations.
- Database handling
- You can configure your message flows to access and manipulate
business data in databases.
- Web services
- IBM App Connect Enterprise can be used as both
a consumer and provider of web services.
- Transport switching
- You can use this type of processing to switch between transports
such as HTTP and JMS.
For information about how to choose the appropriate
edition of IBM App Connect Enterprise to suit your
requirements, see Choosing your IBM App Connect Enterprise operation mode. For more information
about the capabilities provided by IBM App Connect Enterprise,
see IBM App Connect Enterprise features.