A quite possible future project is to connect our system to some 10-20 partners using web services. We will be polling price and product information from their web services.
Of course we could do this directly in Progress, just write programs for each web service, parse xml and then store data in our database.
Could this be a scenario for Sonic (or another ESB)? I had a thought that perhaps we could use Sonic to fetch the data from the web services and then translate it to a generic format. Then in our ABL session all we have to do is handle the generic data.
Is this a good scenario for an ESB or do I have a naive idea of what it can do?
Hi Jens,
I'll be brief but absolutely. This is a typical integration secenario for which the use of an ESB (Sonic) is generally adopted in order to abstract and decouple the transport architecture. As you have effectively highlighted the ESB would be primarily resposnsible for connectivity to, mediation between and orchestration of all external system web service invocations.
Idealy, as you stated, one would want to translate the data for the various source systems into a common/generic data format too. This helps to reduce the number of interfaces and data formats understood by the systems involved Typical for, obvious reasons, this is achieved with XSL on the bus. However the are also far more advance solutions available such as DataXtend Semantic Integrator (DXSI) to help with data abstraction problem. Depending on the size and complexity of the data probelm XSL and similar technologies may be sufficient for your needs.
Happy to help,
Kevin