A B2B Solution using WebSphere Business Integration V4.1 and WebSphere Business Connection V1.1

22 A B2B Solution using WebSphere Business Integration and WebSphere Business Connection

2.1 Introduction

It seems that most businesses have fairly similar requirements relating to the

issues of sending data either between applications or between themselves and

their trading partners.

These are the requirements for most B2B scenarios (in all or part):

򐂰 Ability to send and receive data

򐂰 Definable data formats

Definable message formats allow businesses to communicate with other

businesses, with data that may have to travel between different operating

systems and programs written in different languages. Having a definable

message format will also allow for more of a plug and play solution that will

allow other business or applications to participate in this data sharing. Most

B2B applications will have the business map their data into a generic data

object; this allows for easier manipulation of the data and also allows easier

mapping to different business data formats. It allows for a layer of abstraction

between the data formats of an individual application. This will allow

businesses to “plug in” additional business with minimal configuration.

򐂰 Security of data

Security needs to available from the time the data leaves the sending

application until it arrives at the receiving application. This is even more

important today with many businesses using their intranet or the Internet as

the travel medium.

򐂰 Availability of messaging systems

Messaging systems need to have a capability for failover/recovery and

continuous operations without losing or corrupting any data.

򐂰 Tracking mechanisms

The ability to track the progress of data through the system is required to

provide a user with the ability to see the progress of their data and an

administrator with the ability to perform problem or fault investigation and

resolution.

򐂰 Transactional support

The decision to commit or back out the changes is taken, in the simplest

case, at the end of a transaction. However, given the distributed nature of

B2B transactions, the concept of transactional support takes on a whole new

meaning and level of complexity. Coordination of local transactions and

synchronization of distributed transactions is a key issue for data integrity.