Information Exchange (IX)

The company has decided to test the use of messaging to manage its proposed B2B applications. The plan calls for a small test that will allow a user from outside the firewall to place an order and track its status. The order needs to be booked into the main system. Then, depending on the location of the customer, the order is routed to the nearest region for shipping.

Eventually, the company intends to expand beyond its current in-house distribution system to a system that will allow other businesses to provide the shipping. Therefore, the messages sent between the businesses must also travel over HTTP and be in a self-contained format. XML is the perfect format for the message, and both the Advanced Queueing Servlet and Oracle Internet Directory provide the appropriate routing between the queues.

After the orders are either shipped or back ordered, a message needs to be sent back to appropriate employees to inform them of the order status and to initiate the billing cycle. It is critical that the message be delivered only once and that there be a system for tracking and reviewing messages to facilitate resolution of any discrepancies with the order.

For the purpose of this test application, the company utilizes a single database server and a single application server. The application provides a mechanism for examining the XML messages as well as looking at the queues. To demonstrate connectivity from outside the firewall, both the generation of a new order and customer service reporting are performed using queues. The new order application directly enqueues a queue, while the customer service queries require XML messaging to dequeue a queue.