If you haven’t seen Apache Camel Tutorial Business Partners (other tutorials here), you need to give it a close look:
So there’s a company, which we’ll call Acme. Acme sells widgets, in a fairly unusual way. Their customers are responsible for telling Acme what they purchased. The customer enters into their own systems (ERP or whatever) which widgets they bought from Acme. Then at some point, their systems emit a record of the sale which needs to go to Acme so Acme can bill them for it. Obviously, everyone wants this to be as automated as possible, so there needs to be integration between the customer’s system and Acme.
Sadly, Acme’s sales people are, technically speaking, doormats. They tell all their prospects, “you can send us the data in whatever format, using whatever protocols, whatever. You just can’t change once it’s up and running.”
The result is pretty much what you’d expect. Taking a random sample of 3 customers:
- Customer 1: XML over FTP
- Customer 2: CSV over HTTP
- Customer 3: Excel via e-mail
Now on the Acme side, all this has to be converted to a canonical XML format and submitted to the Acme accounting system via JMS. Then the Acme accounting system does its stuff and sends an XML reply via JMS, with a summary of what it processed (e.g. 3 line items accepted, line item #2 in error, total invoice 123.45). Finally, that data needs to be formatted into an e-mail, and sent to a contact at the customer in question (“Dear Joyce, we received an invoice on 1/2/08. We accepted 3 line items totaling 123.45, though there was an error with line items #2 [invalid quantity ordered]. Thank you for your business. Love, Acme.”).
You don’t have to be a “doormat” to take data as you find it.
Intercepted communications are unlikely to use your preferred terminology for locations or actions. Ditto for web/blog pages.
If you are thinking about normalization of data streams by producing subject-identity enhanced data streams, then you are thinking what I am thinking about Apache Camel.
For further information:
Apache Camel Documentation
Apache Camel homepage
