WebSphere Business Integration Adapters: An Adapter Development and WebSphere Business Integration Solution

Chapter 19. Overview of our scenario and applications 309

19.2 The requirements

Management requires that the solution:

 Provide as much automation and synchronization as possible.

 Give the tenants the ability to query and request their own maintenance using

the Internet.

 Is extensible enough so that, at some point in the future, tenants can use

e-mail to request maintenance or to receive updates.

In addition, management also requests the following restrictions:

 The solution cannot altering existing applications.

 The solution must use an integration broker for any data modification,

enhancement, or semantic mediation.

We have two applications in our scenario. The main application, the back-end

application, is the

RedMaintenance application. With this application, the staff of

the management company maintains tenant and apartment information by

inputting and updating maintenance requests taken by the call center directly into

the application.

The front-end application is the

RedTenant application. With this browser-based

application, the call center operator can obtain details of a tenant and their

apartment. The tenant identifies themselves by their tenant ID. The call center

opperator can check the status of any current requests and enter the details of

any newly created requests, based on the details from the RedMaintenance

system.

The two applications were developed independently. The back-end is a

packaged application. The front-end was developed by a small software

company. The RedTenant application was developed in readiness for an

integration project and is messaging aware (that is, it sends and receives its

queries with queues). Prior to the integration project, a series of programs were

used to access the database in which all of the information for this application

was stored. The programs were written to format the data correctly for the

RedTenant queues.

In our scenario, the two applications will be integrated using a combination of

adapters and the WebSphere integration brokers.

310 WebSphere Business Integration Adapters

The RedTenant application requires no modification other than a change of

queue destination, which sends the requests to the hub using an adapter for

processing. The application sends data through a JMS adapter to the Broker,

where the data is transformed from the business object data that is sent from the

front-end connector to the business object format that is required by the

back-end connector.

Because the back-end application has an exposed API, we use a custom

adapter which was built for the back-end application. This custom adapter

functions in a similar fashion to any other application adapter in the sense that it

is created specifically for use with this particular application using the exposed

API.

Figure 19-2 illustrates the complete integration scenario for the company in our

scenario.

Figure 19-2 Complete integration solution

Red Tenant: Customer proprietary

web application

Not to be modified

Red Maintenance:

Packaged property

maintenance application

Not to be modified

message modification

enhancement

semantic mediation

logging ...

External Contractor application(s)

Tenant

email

Message Broker

JMSConnector

(technology connector)

RMConnector

(request processing)

RM2Connector

(event processing)

Server Foundation

business decision logic

human interaction.

BI Connect (B2B)