B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Integration Brokers 261
• Parsing;
• Intelligent routing;
• Extracting key identifiers and identifying specific processing rules;
and
• Guaranteed secured message delivery.
The messaging services determine when and how the messages are
routed, what to do with a message if the receiving application is not
ready to receive it and several other features typical of a message
broker.
An integration broker can be built either on messaging middleware
or provide adapters for message oriented middleware or message buses.
In either case it has to enable guaranteed messaging of both the
structure (syntax) and the meaning (semantics) of the data between
applications. Many integration broker software vendors use MQ Series
for message queuing.
Message flow control is an important feature that an integration
broker has to support for effective performance results. Assume a
situation in which the source application is generating messages at a
rate much faster than they can be received by the destination. In such
a scenario, messages accumulate in the broker's memory, which may
reduce the available CPU resources for other tasks. It should be able to
throttle the source application, using flow control to avoid losing
messages and slowing down the message throughput of the broker as
a whole. Additionally, the broker should provide robust performance
in the event of server overload and network congestion — all of
which may result in a high number of unretrieved messages in the
message queue.
Each trading partner in a B2B application may have its own
preferences in terms of transaction sets, message formats, communication
transports, access privileges, routing and transformation rules and tracking
and error-handling requirements. Integration brokers should support all
these customizable preferences and enable message routing that directs
data according to conditions set by the business. They should also
enable message formatting so that applications can exchange information
after adapting the presentation of the content to the requirements of the
environment.