Overview » Connecting to Easy bus

A fundamental requirement for any integration platform is that it should be able to connect to external systems. These can be other systems used within the same organization, or they could be the interfaces made available by other parties like customers, business partners or suppliers. Depending on technical possibilities of the integration platform and those of the external systems that wish to connect, the whole process can be a straightforward matter or it could become a very complex project. A ‘worst-case scenario’ would be to implement separate slightly different communication channels for each external party, according to the version of the industry standards they are able to support. Developing and managing such a landscape can very quickly get out of hand.

Easy bus prevents such a problematic scenario and aims at minimizing the development and management effort. Instead, it lets the user focus on the business process and on the functional content of the messages by supplying standard components that take care of most of the communication with external systems. The Easy bus component responsible for this ‘heavy lifting’ task is the so-called ‘Generic Onramp’.

The Generic Onramp is one endpoint located on an HTTPs URL that can accept a great variety of message formats from many different sources. Accepted protocols include file, POP3, MSMQ, web services, WCF and REST services etc.
Most protocols require a response, either a synchronous or an asynchronous response. The normal behavior of the Easy bus Generic Onramp is to provide a synchronous acknowledgement message upon receiving a request. The enterprise service bus then processes the message according to the configured itinerary and eventually sends the results of processing as a separate message at a later stage.
In most cases the incoming message to the Generic Onramp will be in XML format: in this case the synchronous response of the Generic Onramp is given also in XML as in the example below. Messages in other formats can always be sent to the Generic Onramp, which will usually provide an XML response message.

XML response

A different case is when the incoming message to the Generic Onramp is in the JSON format: in this case the Generic Onramp will provide its synchronous response in JSON. A sample JSON response message is given in the following example.

JSON response

For those scenarios where a synchronous functional response is necessary, the Generic Onramp provides the option to turn off the synchronous acknowledgement, process the message and send the actual response back to the other system through an apposite ‘Responder’ step that can be added to any itinerary.
In addition to all this, the Generic Onramp also has an exposed WSDL, so it can act as a service and coherently answer to the requests sent to it. The wsdl file of the Generic Onramp service can be downloaded from EZBus.GenericOnramp.WSDL.