Service integration technologies
Service integration is a set of technologies that provides asynchronous messaging services. Use this topic to learn about the technologies on which WebSphere® Application Server service integration applications are developed and implemented.
- Service integration buses and bus members
- Application servers or clusters of application servers in a WebSphere Application Server cell can cooperate to provide asynchronous messaging services. Service integration provides asynchronous messaging services, and a group of servers or clusters that cooperate in this way is called a service integration bus. The application servers or server clusters in a bus are known as bus members. You can also add bus members that are IBM MQ servers; service integration uses these bus members to write messages to, and read messages from, IBM MQ queues.
Different service integration buses can, if required, be connected. This allows applications that use one bus (the local bus) to send messages to destinations in another bus (a foreign bus). Note, though, that applications cannot receive messages from destinations in a foreign bus.
- Messaging engines
- Each service integration server or cluster bus member contains a component called a messaging engine that processes messaging send and receive requests and that can host destinations. To host queue-type destinations, the messaging engine includes a message store where, if necessary, it can hold messages until consuming applications are ready to receive them, or preserve messages in case the messaging engine fails.
If the bus member is a server cluster, it can have additional messaging engines to provide high availability or workload sharing characteristics. If the bus member is a IBM MQ server, it does not have a messaging engine, but it lets you access IBM MQ queues directly from IBM MQ queue managers and (for IBM MQ for z/OS®) queue-sharing groups.
- Messaging providers
- WebSphere Application Server applications invoke asynchronous messaging services by using the Java Messaging Service (JMS) application programming interface (API) to interface to a messaging provider. WebSphere Application Server supports a variety of JMS messaging providers, including service integration (which is the default messaging provider) and IBM MQ as an external JMS messaging provider.