| Tomas Restrepo \(MVP\) 2005-09-28, 2:49 am |
| Wing,
> We have a requirement to write a program that will create an XML message
> and
> send it via an http post to another company's servers (in fact 6 other
> companies). The program will wait for the response XML message from each
> company (or timeout) and then display all results in a web page.
>
> There is a standard message format for all companies which we must adhere
> to. There is a message schema that defines all of the constants and data
> types that we will be dealing with.
>
> We are going to build a component that accepts data input by the user on a
> webpage and then formats the data into an XML message. It will then post
> that requuest off to 6 diff companies.
>
> We will build the application in ASP.net and VB.Net.
>
> My question is this - I know very little about BizTalk, I am wondering
> if
> there is a place for BizTalk server in this application. If there is
> where
> would it fit in.
BizTalk could certainly do what you're proposing. Instead of having the
website do all the work, you could generate an XML document and submit it to
biztalk, and then have an orchestration that uses BizTalk's transformation
and messaging facilities to deal with the rest (heck, from your description,
it sounds like you might also be able to take advantage of the Trading
Partner Management facilities in BizTalk 2004 to coordinate your
relationships with the six companies you're integrating with).
Using biztalk would be interesting considering that, at any moment, you
might find that one (or all) of the companies you're integrating with, or a
new one, requires messages to be in different formats of with different
structure, and biztalk does provide the tooling to deal with that in a much
cleaner way.
That said, whether your specific scenario warrants the cost of implementing
biztalk, is hard to say from your description. It would depend on the
specific requirements and what plans, if any, do you have on how
requirements for this solution in the future might evolve...
--
Tomas Restrepo
tomasr@mvps.org
http://www.winterdom.com/
|