It would be tempting to think that in this age of XML, web services, SOAP, and various other Internet-inspired technologies that messaging would all be using the latest and greatest of technologies and formats.

But it’s not actually the case — while XML is growing in popularity, older formats such as flat files still are very common. That’s reality when you start talking to “legacy” systems. Even if you agree that new systems should talk XML, given the inevitable budget and time constraints, it’s not as if all the old systems can or should be re-engineered or upgraded to talk XML.

The MXC software is designed to handle precisely this kind of situation: varieties of systems using disparate languages, yet all trying to talk to each other. MXC sits in the middle and makes sense of it all. The way it does so is by allowing users to configure the system to tell it what sort of messages it is receiving and sending, and by setting up routing and translation rules in the middle.

Suppose you’re trying to link up two systems which use different dialects of text flatfiles — say one that speaks comma delimited, with a header including date/time, body records, and a trailer with a record count… but the second system talks pipe delimiters, and a different format for dates, times and numbers, and fields in a different order.

MXC uses XML natively, but has facilities to allow all sorts of non-XML-formatted messages to be configured too. it handles non-XML formatted messages by allowing the system to be configured. Internally those messages are converted into XML for processing, with so in the above theoretical example, the source and destination systems can happily talk their own dialects of FlatFile to the black box of the MXC.

And MXC can route the messages elsewhere if needed, be it in XML or any of the multitude of other supported formats.

Thus the “legacy” systems can talk to each other, they can also talk to newer systems without having to be retrofitted for XML, the sun keeps shining, and everybody’s happy.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 10th, 2006 at 4:40 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.