i am trying to connect mainframe from MuleESB we have CICS regions but i am not sure how useful CICS regions to connect and do we need to connect MQ to intgrate with Mainframe. is thr any way with out connecting MQ can we connect mainframes
CICS itself is capable of being connected to using many different transports, including MQ and HTTP. Within those transports, CICS also supports many data formats, including SOAP for Web Services, JSON, binary, and so on.
It'll depend on your exact setup at your organisation as to which have been enabled, so you'll need to find out which transports are available for you to use and which data formats they're talking.
If you have IBM's WebSphere MQ on your mainframe, you will find it easy to communicate to your mainframe CICS transactions using the standard JMS component in Mule...we do this all the time using ActiveMQ, which is very familiar to any Mule developer. You will need a JMS "bridge" to connect Active MQ to WebSphere MQ - see ActiveMQ bridge connector to WebSphereMQ without using XML config.
Once you have connectivity, there are a lot of alternatives as to the various data formats and message payloads. As Ben Cox says, you have a bewildering array of choices, from raw application objects to XML, SOAP, JSON and so forth. Most of what you use at this level will probably depend on whether you're connecting to existing applications, or building new software that you can control.
If you're comfortable extending Mule using it's Connector Factory APIs, you should be able to encapsulate most of the information in a way that's Mule-friendly. We do this today in several large systems and it works quite well overall.
Related
I would like to know how, if possible, a client app (winform) sends NServicebus command A to be processed by a MSMQ queue and command B to be processed by a Azure storage queue or Azure service bus? If not, how may I get around of it?
Since this question was asked, there is now a transport bridge which is specifically for this scenario: bridging messages between two different transports.
Will this help? https://docs.particular.net/samples/azure/azure-service-bus-msmq-bridge/
Common examples include:
A hybrid solution that spans across endpoints deployed on-premises and in a cloud environment.
Departments within organization integrating their systems that use different messaging technologies for historical reasons.
Traditionally, such integrations would require native messaging or relaying. Bridging is an alternative, allowing endpoints to communicate over different transports without a need to get into low-level messaging technology code. With time, when endpoints can standardize on a single transport, bridging can be removed with a minimal impact on the entire system.```
For example, since our server is using TIBCO EMS, would I be able to connect to it using OpenJMS or WeblogicJMS?
JMS standardizes the API, but not the wire-protocol. So all JMS implementations are based on the same API interfaces, but you will require different implementation libraries/jar-files in your class-path that match the server you're connecting to. In the TIBCO EMS case, if you're connecting to a EMS, you'll need tibjms.jar and possibly other of this jars; you cannot use something from OpenJMS etc. instead since they use different wire-protocols.
JMS is pretty much the same as JDBC in this regard.
I have explored the web on MULE and got to understand that for Apps to communicate among themselves - even if they are deployed in the same Mule instance - they will have to use either TCP, HTTP or JMS transports.
VM isn't supported.
However I find this a bit contradictory to ESB principles. We should ideally be able to define EndPoints in and ESB and connect to that using any Transport? I may be wrong.
Also since all the apps are sharing the same JVM one would expect to be able to communicate via the in-memory VM queue rather than relying on a transactionless HTTP protocol, or TCP where number of connections one can make is dependent on server resources. Even for JMS we need to define and manage another queue and for heavy usage that may have impact on performances. Though I agree if we have distributed and clustered systems may be HTTP or JMS will be only options.
Is there any plan to incorporate VM as a inter-app communication protocol or is there any other way one Flow can communicate with another Flow Endpoint but in different app?
EDIT : - Answer from Mulesoft
http://forum.mulesoft.org/mulesoft/topics/concept_of_endpoint_and_inter_app_communication
Yes, we are thinking about inter-app communication for a future release.
Still is not clear when we are going to do it but we have a couple of ideas on how we want this feature to behave. We may create a server level configuration in which you can define resources to use in all your apps. There you would be able to define a VM connector and use it to send messages between apps in the same server.
As I said, this is just an idea.
Regarding the usage of VM as inter-app communication, only MuleSoft can answer if VM will have a future feature or not.
I don't think it's contradictory to the ESB principle. The "container" feature is pretty well defined in David A Chappell's "Enterprise Service Bus book" chapter 6. The container should try it's best to keep the applications isolated.
This will provide some benefits like "independently deployable integration services" (same chapter), easier clusterization, and other goodies.
You should approach same VM inter-app communications as if they where between apps placed in different servers.
Seems that Mule added in 3.5 version, a feature to enable communication between apps deployed in the same server. But sharing a VM connector is only available in the Enterprise edition.
Info:
http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/current/Shared+Resources#SharedResources-DefiningDomains
Example:
http://blogs.mulesoft.org/optimize-resource-utilization-mule-shared-resources/
I am confused about the function of Apache ActiveMQ.
I downloaded ActiveMQ from this link.
So I use it this way (environment: Windows 7): I start the bin/activemq.bat, then it works.
My question is: Does this mean I start a server on my machine? When I initialize the ActiveMQConnectionFactory, the broker URL is tcp://localhost:61616. But what if I want my machine to serve as a server and another machine to connect to my server?
Yes, you can use the primary box as a server and have consumers/subscribers running on other boxes (which will need to connect to the server - you will need to specify the server hostname & port for the connection to be established) - once in place, the messages on the server (topic or queue) can be consumed by the clients.
If you one have one producer and one consumer, you can look into using queues - if you have more than one consumer/subscriber, you can look into setting up a topic to which the consumers will subscribe to. Messages need to be inserted to the topic/queue as needed.
You can specify the server information in your code or preferably in the config file.
For reference to topologies:
http://activemq.apache.org/topologies.html
Also, you can choose to persist your messages or not based on your use case. Kaha DB is the preferred route (specially if performance is of concern).
Useful examples:
http://sujitpal.blogspot.com/2007/12/jms-patterns-with-activemq.html
http://vvratha.blogspot.com/2012/05/java-client-to-sendreceive-messages-for.html
Hope it helps.
Apache ActiveMQ ™ is the most popular and powerful open source messaging and Integration Patterns server
& it act like a third party server.
Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License.
ActiveMQ have the capabilities to send 100 MB single message framework and maintain 1000 concurrent connection simultaneously , for the further information you can check activemq.xml in your documentation.
Further Info at here about the ActiveMQ
I understand to an extent that it helps applications communicate regardless of their location. Why is it important and what is an example of a real-world use of WCF?
WCF is a generic communication mechanism that allows you to setup generic client/host communication between two parties. The neat thing about WCF is that is allows you to configure service properties such as transport (http/pipes/tcp/Tibco EMS), security models (any of the W3C standards), compression, encoding, timeouts, etc, without changing ANY code. That is powerful. Best of all, you can configure it so that you can have a service in C# and a client in Java (or any other language or the other way around), as long as they both talk using the same mechanisms.
You can create a standard HTTP SOAP web service using WCF and one day decide to switch it to use the faster named pipes for local communication. You can create web services that talk over TibcoEMS and have easy failover on the queue level. You can create a file streaming web service that distributes all kinds of images/videos to your application.
Here Are some brain dump i think might be useful to understand the whole scenario.
Reason of Creating WCF : Background
Modern Application[Distributed Application] development we use different architechtures and technologies for communication
i.e:
COM+
.NET Enterprise Services
MSMQ
.NET Remoting
Web Services
As there are various technologies. they all have different architechtures. so learning all them are tricky and tedious.
one need to focus on each technologies to develop rather than the application business logic
so microsoft unifies the capabilities into single, common, general service oriented programming model for Communication. WCF provides a common approach using a common API which developers can focus on their application rather than on communication protocol.
Now-a-days we call it WCF.
N.B: image collected from - http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/255114/Windows-Communication-Foundation-Basics
What Exactly WCF Service Stands For?
WCF lets you asynchronus messages transform one service endpoint to another.
The Message Can be simple as
A Single Character
A word
sent as XML
complex data structure as a stream of binary data
Windows Communication Foundation(WCF) supports multiple language & platforms.
WCF Provides you a runtime environment for your services enabling you to expose CLR types as Services and to consume other Services as CLR Types.
A few sample scenarios include:
A secure service to process business transactions.
A service that supplies current data to others, such as a traffic report or other monitoring service.
A chat service that allows two people to communicate or exchange data in real time.
A dashboard application that polls one or more services for data and presents it in a logical presentation.
Exposing a workflow implemented using Windows Workflow Foundation as a WCF service.
A Silverlight application to poll a service for the latest data feeds.
Why on Earth We Should Use WCF?
from a Code Project Article, thanks to #Mehta Priya I found the following Scenarios to illustrate the concept. Let us consider two Scenario:
The first client is using java App to interact with our Service. So for interoperability this client wants the messages in XML format and the Protocol to be HTTP.
The Second client uses .NET so far better performance this clients wants messages in binary format and the protocol to be TCP.
Without WCF Services
now for the stated scenarios if we don't use WCF then what will happen let's see with the following images:
Scenario 1 :
Scenario 2:
These are two different technologies and have completely differently programming models. So the developers have to learn different technologies
so to unify & bring all technologies under one roof. Microsoft has come with a new programming model called WCF.
How WCF Make things easy ?
one implement a service and he/she can configure as many end points as it required to support all the client needs .
To support the above 2 client requirements
-we would configure 2 end points
-we can specify the protocols and message formats that we want to use in the end point of configuration
References:
WCF : What , Why and When https://vishalnayan.wordpress.com/2010/12/31/wcf-what-why-when/
Why we use WCF Service? http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/815742/Why-We-Use-WCF-Service-and-Sample-of-WCF-Service
What Is Windows Communication Foundation https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731082(v=vs.110).aspx
Windows Communication Foundation Basics http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/255114/Windows-Communication-Foundation-Basics
There's little to add to the responses so far, especially the one from "siz".
One thing to add is that WCF is the current way to do web services on the .NET platform. It's not the "new" way, it's the current way. ASMX web services are the old and just barely maintained way. One Microsoft employee has publicly stated that only critical security fixes will be made to the ASMX platform, so if you intend for your services to be useful more than a year from now, don't use ASMX.
In addition to the typical "web service" use cases, WCF handles atypical cases, like binary communication over named pipes, message queues, etc. To a very large extent, the service you write to support something simple like SOAP over SSL can also support these other protocols, with no changes to the code.
To answer the "real world" bit, I'm just finishing up a dispatch system by which a Visual Basic 6.0/access alarm receiver, a WPF/SQL ERP system and an iPhone application all share information to schedule and execute jobs.
Essentially the use case is where you want two separate applications to talk to each other somehow and their locations are unknown (could be same machine (but different application domain), same network or on the other side of the internets)
You can easily embed it into a Windows Forms application. That was a nice thing to discover. It is so much easier than .NET Remoting too.
There are a number of reasons why it is advantageous over classic ASP.NET web services (.asmx).
A couple of these off the top of my head are:
The ability to have multiple bindings for the same service call means the message doesn't have to serialise into XML and back if you simply want to communicate inside a web farm.
The way contracts are defined is much more forgiving when it comes to multiple versions of the same contract.