I'll take a stab at this since I had to wrestle with the same issue going to work for my current employer. My situation is a bit different since I come from a J2EE background; it took me a little while to understand the purpose behind using an enterprise service bus.
Proprietary systems such as Siebel or SAP give you the ability to expose services as web-services as well as provide connectors for your J2EE applications to integrate with. In the case that all of your applications run off of the same proprietary system, then this is well. Most companies though have multiple legacy systems, databases and applications that because of investment, resources, etc. aren't able to cut over to a consolidated all-in-one system such as SAP. Being able to expose business functionality to customers via web-services in such an environment is extremely difficult without the use of an ESB. The company I work for manages the deregulated energy market for the state of Texas. Our systems receive hundreds of thousands of transactions per day from a large number of companies. Internally we have about a dozen different databases for various applications that all must be updated based on the content of the transactions we receive from market participants. Furthermore, a given transaction may need to trigger different transactions sent to other companies and responses monitored, etc. Needless to say the business logic behind processing our transactions is quite complex and without the use of an ESB maintaining these systems would be a nightmare. Our ESB (not ServiceMix) allows us to consolidate all of our transaction processing logic into one application. Regards, Thad Smith -----Original Message----- From: denis krizanovic [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2005 6:47 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [servicemix-user] Business Level use cases Hi, I've been lurking on this list for a while and am still struggling with understanding how a JBI container meets my integration needs. I come from a traditional integration background (if you must know webm, wli, novell composer) and am looking to understand how jbi solutions can play the same role. So, what I propose is two typical usecases for an integration project. And am wondering if someone can draw me a picture of all the JBI services I would need to do this. In some ways, a product mapping. I'm not concerned with whether the component exists today, but rather the architectural vision of this JBI thing. 1. SAP Sales Order Customer says he wants to expose a SAP Sales Order over a webservice. In a traditional approach I would use the connector to expose the SAP RFC as XML (or some proprietary record structure). I would do some click-drag-click mapping of the ugly SAP structure into my lovely human-readable XML and would then expose this "mapping service" as an endpoint. This is a synchronous process, but that doesn't matter too much. Actually, I'll leave it at this simple use case. Depending on the answer I might be able to figure out the more complicated one. thanks, dk-
