Integration queues for Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation integration servers

The integration servers use integration-based queues to communicate from or to external systems. For example, in the following figure, the first queue could be used by external systems such as a Web store frontend to pass order creation requests to Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation. It could also be purchase orders from a purchasing system, shipment status updates from a logistics management system, and so forth.

integration_queues

Similarly, Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation integration servers can use integration queues to send messages to external systems. For example, Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation can send ship notices to warehouses.

Since these messages are used for communicating between systems, the messages in the integration queues should be protected so that they are not lost in the event of a failure. In some cases, these messages can be difficult to recreate. For example, as described above, if messages from a Web store is lost, the Web store will have to resend the missing orders. The recovery will involve having to determine what orders have already been processed to find what is missing. Care will have to be taken to ensure that orders that have already been processed are not resent.

In general, integration queues should be implemented on reliable redundant persistent stores.