Patterns: Broker Interactions for Intra- and Inter-enterprise

220 Broker Interactions for Intra- and Inter-enterprise

9.1 Business scenario

ITSO Electronics plan to integrate their Retail and Wholesale systems. Each

department has an existing IT infrastructure, but currently there is no connectivity

between their applications. The Retail systems must be able to request delivery

dates for parts from the Wholesale systems without knowing which Wholesale

system supplies the part. In the event that there are multiple Wholesale systems

that can supply the part, the earliest delivery date must be returned to the Retail

system.

Initially, this solution will be applied to internal Retail and Wholesale systems.

Once it has been tested, it will be extended to allow Retail systems to get

delivery dates from external wholesale suppliers.

In addition, ITSO Electronics wants the Retail systems to be able to send data to

the internal Wholesale departments about current sales. This data is stored at

the Wholesale location and analyzed to determine future sales trends. The data

itself is not important to the operation of the company, rather it is used by

analysts as input when determining future growth areas. The data is used much

as survey data would be used.

9.2 IBM WebSphere Business Integration Message

Broker

WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker enables information,

packaged as messages, to flow between different business applications. With

this new product, the functions of WebSphere MQ Integrator and WebSphere

MQ Event Broker have merged into one product consisting of:

򐂰 WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker providing broker

functionality for point-to-point messaging.

򐂰 WebSphere Business Integration Event Broker providing pub/sub

functionality.

During installation, you can elect to install just Event Broker, or Event Broker and

Message Broker (Event Broker is a prerequisite for Message Broker).

9.2.1 Architectural overview

WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker (Figure 9-1) consists of the

following components:

򐂰 Message Brokers Toolkit for WebSphere Studio, which is a new feature

replacing the Control Center of WebSphere MQ Integrator V2.1, as well as

Chapter 9. Broker solutions using WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker 221

adding extended functionality in many new areas. For brevity, we refer to it as

the Message Brokers Toolkit.

򐂰 Configuration Manager, which contains a repository for configurations and

messages

򐂰 User Name Server, which is used for publish/subscribe security functionality

򐂰 Publish / subscribe functionality.

򐂰 WebSphere MQ queue manager(s), which provide the underlying transport

infrastructure for the WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker

򐂰 User application programs, which generate messages and request them to be

transformed and routed to other destinations in a messaging infrastructure,

according to specific business rules

򐂰 Message broker(s), the runtime component consisting of

execution groups,

containing deployed message flows.

Figure 9-1 WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker architecture

WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker

Message

Flow

Message

Sets

Message

Flow

Message

Sets

Broker

Message

Flow

Message

Sets

Broker

Domain

Optional User

Name Server

Configuration

Manager

Application

Application Application

Application

Repository

Message Brokers Toolkit

222 Broker Interactions for Intra- and Inter-enterprise

Message Brokers Toolkit

The Message Brokers Toolkit integrated development environment provides an

environment to perform application development and broker administration tasks

for message brokers. The Message Brokers Toolkit is an Eclipse-based

workbench tool, available on the Windows 2000 and XP platform. It is also

available as a plugin for WebSphere Studio Application Developer - Integrated

Edition.

The Message Brokers Toolkit consists of a workbench window which displays

one or more perspectives. A perspective is a group of views and editors required

to perform tasks associated with a role. The two primary perspectives used for

the development and deployment of message flows are as follows:

򐂰 The Broker Application Development perspective is used for application

development tasks and is the default perspective shown when the Message

Brokers Toolkit is first started. It is used to:

– Develop message flows and message sets

– Deploy message flows and message sets to the broker

– Put and get messages from queues for debugging purposes

򐂰 The Broker Administration perspective is used to perform tasks to manage

one or more brokers. It is used to:

– Create and manage broker domains and topology

– Create and manage execution groups

– Create and deploy broker archive (bar) files to execution groups

– Manage publish/subscribe topics and subscriptions

– Manage event logs and alerts

A single Message Brokers Toolkit can connect to multiple Configuration

Managers allowing it to manage multiple broker domains.

The broker administration functions are also available as command line utilities.

This allows for scripting of commands to enable automated operation for such

tasks as deployment and configuration.

Configuration Manager

The Configuration Manager is the central runtime component that manages the

components and resources that constitute the broker domain.

The Configuration Manager has four main functions:

򐂰 Maintains configuration details in the configuration repository. This is a set of

database tables that provide a central record of the broker domain

components.