Rich Messaging Endpoints

In the topic About Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs, we saw that one of the core requirements from Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs is to bridge the message and transport protocol mismatch between two disparate systems. In cloud parlance, we should think of each system on the cloud as an endpoint on the Service Bus. A message exchange between these two endpoints (which are either extensions of on-premises applications or representing an application running on the cloud) happens through Service Bus. Service Bus being a purely relay service, just passes on the message originating from one endpoint to another. However, given that the two systems are disparate and probably follow different messaging format and protocols, it becomes imperative that the Service Bus provides rich processing capabilities between the two endpoints. The processing capabilities could include the following:

• The ability to connect systems following different transport protocols
  
  
• The ability to validate the message originating from the source endpoint against a standard schema
  
  
• The ability to transform the message as required by destination endpoints
  
  
• The ability to enrich the message and extract specified properties from the message. The extracted properties can then be used to route the message to a destination or an intermediary endpoint.
  
  

All these capabilities are made available through what are called ‘rich messaging endpoints’ available as part of Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs. As the name suggests, these endpoints offer message processing capabilities over and above the Service Bus relay messaging infrastructure. The following diagram depicts how rich messaging endpoints bridge mismatches between systems and applications.

To sum it up, Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs offers four major components (connectivity, validation, extraction, transformation) that can be stitched together to provide rich messaging endpoints.

• Connectors: These bridge the gap between different transport protocols as well as different LOB applications that exist on the premise behind a firewall but expose their operational endpoints on the cloud. Currently, Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs only provides connectivity between some LOB applications such as SQL Server, SAP, Siebel, and Oracle databases/E-Business Suite. For more information, see Service Bus Connect.
  
  

  Note
  For the current release, Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs only supports the HTTP transport protocol.

• Validation, Extraction, Enrichment, and Transformation: Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs provides these capabilities as different stages of a ‘message processing bridge’. Each of these stages can be configured as part of the bridge. For more information, see Message-Processing Bridges.
  
  

  Note
  While validation, extraction, and enrichment can be configured as part of the bridge, transforms can either be created separately and then added to the bridge, or configured implicitly as part of the bridge. For more information, see Transforms.

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