+1 on the non-XML file processing. My real-world experience has also been that legacy systems only capable of flat-file processing is the bleak reality of many enterprises. Not only that, but often you have to poll or write files to the filesystem. It isn't ideal, but it is necessary.
I am also trying to evaluate ServiceMix as an ESB solution. So far, I like the idea of a normalized message bus quite a lot vs. the anything-goes nature of Mule (which so far, among other things, seems to make it very non-intuitive to use). But you have to have some sort of inbound tranlator to normalize non-XML files so they can flow on the bus. To simply wrap any random big string of text in <file></file> and call it "normalized" is not very useful and IMHO undermines the whole philosophy. Perhaps a configurable/declarative mechanism for working with text files is in order. Ideally, it would handle files that may have either character-delimited or fixed-width fields, and may not necessarily be broken down into a simple one-line-per-record scenario (i.e. may have a header line, footer line, or perhaps even where more than one line equates to a record). I wouldn't mind seeing if I could come up with some sort of Flat-File extension to the FilePoller or something similar, but I am also having some trouble getting things outside the provided examples to work (hopefully/probably just newbie errors). So I guss I can only offer my meek little "me too" for now... Neal ________________________________ From: John L. Simpson (sent by Nabble.com) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, December 02, 2005 8:45 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [servicemix-user] Files binding: processing non-XML files I second Sad's query. I am fully for JBI and the concept of a normalized message. However, in the real world, we are faced with applications which spit out non-XML data. And I'm not talking about awkward binary files - just plain-text ASCII files which lack XML markup and perhaps contain some illegal characters. (In my case, the files contain a few control characters like x00 and x03).
