The architecture

Business Integration Connect enables business-to-business (B2B) process integration and data sharing among partners of all types and sizes. It can be thought of as a suite of distributed, multi-tier Java(TM) applications that are architected from the ground up to exploit the benefits of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and that work together to provide B2B functionality to enterprises. Each Business Integration Connect offering instance is deployed on a per enterprise/community basis. Enterprises and their partners benefit from reduced integration costs and faster deployment of new processes and services, using open standards and proven technology.

As described in Overview of the WebSphere product family, the three major components of Business Integration Connect are the Receiver, the Console, and the Document Manager.

Figure 7 shows how the components work together:

Figure 7. WebSphere Business Integration Connect components


The sections that follow describe in more detail the components and their relationship to the database and shared storage. Note that all components must have access to the same file system.

Receiver

The Receiver component accepts documents from community participants and from back-end systems and stores them. Specifically, it:

The Receiver records any transport-specific data (for example, the source IP address and certificate information about the SSL connection) to the metadata file and completes any transport-specific technical acknowledgment (for example, sending a 200 response to an HTTP POST).

Document Manager

The Document Manager retrieves stored data, processes it, and routes it, both to community participants and to enterprise systems. Specifically, it:

  1. Reads the raw document and metadata and saves the inbound document to the non-repudiation directory on shared storage
  2. Processes the data to the destination format (performing tasks such as validation and transformation, if specified) and saves the destination document to the non-repudiation directory on shared storage
  3. Delivers data to its intended destination, which could be a JMS queue, a directory, or a URL.

The following sections describe how the subcomponents of the Document Manager perform the tasks presented in the previous list.

Document Processing Engine

The Document Processing Engine performs all of the processing of documents. The Document Processing Engine is responsible for:

State Engine

The State Engine encapsulates the business rules on a per-protocol basis and executes instructions based on those rules (for example, initiating a retry when no acknowledgment has been received in the defined interval).

Alert Engine

The Alert Engine monitors activity and generates e-mail notifications. You can configure the Alert Engine to specify which alerts are generated, to whom the alerts are sent, and when the alerts are delivered.

Delivery Manager

The Delivery Manager component is responsible for transporting documents to specific destinations, maintaining a separate queue of documents for each destination. A dedicated transport mechanism exists for each destination, so problems delivering to one destination should not affect transport to other destinations.

Community Console

The Community Console is a Web-based, J2EE application for configuring, administering, and monitoring trading community activities, and responding to events. Its users are primarily: the Community Operator, the Community Manager, and the community participant. The console provides role-based access control to the various features and views. The features of the console include:

Database

A prerequisite DB2 Universal Database Enterprise or Oracle 9.2 database is used as the data repository. It is here that partner profile information is stored and events are logged. The data repository is also where guidelines and maps (for validation and translation) are stored, where the state of various processes is recorded, and where trading activity is tracked.

The information stored in the data repository is used by Business Integration Connect to provide the administrator with visibility into the entire trading community.

A prerequisite DB2 Universal Database Enterprise or Oracle 9.2 database is used as the data repository. It is here that partner profile information is stored and events are logged. The data repository is also where guidelines and maps (for validation and translation) are stored, where the state of various processes is recorded, and where trading activity is tracked.

The information stored in the data repository is used by Business Integration Connect to provide the administrator with visibility into the entire trading community.

Note that some information (for example, the raw message data in the non-repudiation and message stores) is kept on the shared file system, as described in File System.

Profile

The participant profile consists of configuration data that is used in document routing and console access. The profile information includes:

The participant data includes participant names and business identifiers such as DUNS numbers. A single partner can have one or more business identifiers.

Users are accounts that have access to the Business Integration Connect console. A user account gets its permissions to interact with the console based on group membership.

Contacts are similar to users; however, they cannot interact with the console, and they can only be configured to receive notifications from the alert system.

Gateways

A gateway specifies the destination information needed for the Document Manager to send a document to the Community Manager or to another participant. A gateway is defined by a gateway definition, which includes a destination URI, optional login information, and transport-level settings for the gateway.

Participant connections

Connections define valid interactions between community participants. They include information about the document protocol, document type, source participant, target participant, connection type, and source and target gateways. The Document Manager uses the information in the connection to determine if translation is required and to determine the destination gateway information.

Certificates and IP addresses

The following security information is stored:

Alerts configuration

Alerts are defined at a participant level and consist of a variety of attributes to describe event-based alerts or volume alerts.

You can define event-based alerts so that they will be triggered each time the event occurs or so that they will batched, based on an interval. You can also configure the alert with a contact list for notification based on a defined schedule.

Document activity

Business Integration Connect logs information to describe documents as they are routed. Details are logged about the document as it was received and as it was transmitted. The following types of information are logged:

Document events

Business Integration Connect uses events to track activities and logs the events in a central event log. The events, which are classified as Informational, Warning, or Critical Errors, can be generated by different components in Business Integration Connect.

Events can be tied back to document activity when they are in relation to a document that was routed by Business Integration Connect. The events can also track non-document related activities, such as logging into the system.

Summary data

Business Integration Connect summarizes key metrics, which can be displayed in the console. The information that is summarized includes:

These counts are rolled up by hour and can be correlated back to the document activity logs.

File System

The following information is stored in the shared file system:

Non-Repudiation data repository

Documents are stored on a disk that has shared access from all components of Business Integration Connect (Receiver, Console, and Document Manager). Both the original document (as it was received) and the final document (as it was sent) are stored.

Message data repository

Documents are stored in an unencrypted form for displaying to the console. This disk also has shared access from all components of Business Integration Connect (Receiver, Console, and Document Manager).

Communication using JMS

Communication between some components is done using JMS. JMS queues with reliable storage allow the flexibility of locating components on different machines while still maintaining a standard inter-component communication method.

Copyright IBM Corp. 2003, 2004