One of the success criteria in putting a centralised architecture in place is standardisation and simplification of real-time data interchange between applications.
01THE PITFALLS
An ESB or Enterprise Service Bus can be defined as a toolkit ensuring the security of data exchanges between sources and targets in an information system.
The central component of an ESB can be described as a channel used to convey data between applications (called an “application bus”) which is intended to guarantee both the routing and persistence of data.
The ESB works in a very simple way. The data interchange structure is standardised and, rather than build direct interfaces between applications, relevant applications will subscribe to the messages available in the ESB in which they are interested. The ESB takes charge of data transport and is able to deliver very large volumes of data in real time.
02METHODS AND SOLUTIONS
Unlike traditional interfaces, executed on the basis of procedure calls, setting up an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) brings numerous advantages, but the most important two tasks it makes possible are :
The ESB retrieves data messages and knows that they are to be distributed to information system applications that have “subscribed” to those messages. However, if one application is not immediately available, the ESB does not block data transport and integration into other applications that are available; it activates “persistence” mode to continue attempting to deliver the message until the application in question is available again.
This way of operating also permits greater application upgradeability because each application can run its updates separately, and the Blueway ESB is also able to supplement messages by managing intermediate distribution circuits in order to enrich the master data repository on the basis of application responses.
03THE BLUEWAY SOLUTION
The full set of Blueway platform functionalities, including EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), ETL, mashups and BPM, all connect natively to this ESB using a graphical user interface with no need for program development.
Other tools within this bus provide dynamic data routing functions, mechanisms to handle transformations, queue management, authentication, encryption and so on.
