Moving Forward with the On Demand Real-time Enterprise

Chapter 4. IBM technologies supporting real-time 215

򐂰 WebSphere Partner Gateway: Enables your business to extend integration

beyond your enterprise, integrating with trading partners to create a

community of businesses, exchanging information and sharing processes.

4.5.1 WebSphere Message Broker

WebSphere Message Broker integrates different applications and systems,

providing transformation and enrichment of in-flight information to provide a level

of intermediation between applications that use different message and data

structures and formats. The product enables applications to work together so

that they exchange information as though they had been designed to do so from

the start. It provides the ability to have a range of connectivity options between

applications, to meet both the needs of the applications and the requirement for

the distribution of the integrated data, and provides all this within a

comprehensive environment separate from the application development. Thus,

users such as application developers can concentrate on business logic without

reducing application and business flexibility by custom coding connectivity and

integration logic in the applications and services throughout the business.

WebSphere Message Broker enriches and distributes real-time information from

virtually any source of information held in any format through a network of access

points or a centralized broker and out to multiple receiving endpoints, each

provided with tailored data, and this can provide a powerful approach in unifying

the IT potential of an organization.

Connectivity to and from WebSphere Message Broker can take advantage of the

assured delivery offered by products such as WebSphere MQ or WebSphere

Application Server, meaning that transactions will take place and complete even

after a temporary network failure, so that users and their customers can be

confident that information, which is transmitted as messages, will be delivered.

With WebSphere Message Broker, users can connect and integrate nearly all

types of applications and data to almost any endpoint through a single extensible

and configurable environment. The graphical Eclipse-based programming

environment of WebSphere Message Broker provides users with a powerful and

architected integration layer which will help them to avoid the burden of writing

complex bespoke programming as a part of each application or to make use of

each data source. Because WebSphere Message Broker provides functions

such as reusable components, adding new connections, applications, or

interactions with data is vastly simplified and releases programmers to

concentrate on new and changing business requirements.

Connectivity and information sharing between applications for environments that

were never designed to work together free users from manual re-keying of data

from one application to another. All of an organization's business data is