I spent half of a day looking at what you can do with IBMs Websphere Message Broker (MB). I first thought that it was a simple suite of programs which acted 'middleware' between systems. But it quickly dawned on me that it was so much more.
Its clearly very useful. Putting it simply, you install a tube between two applications, and this tube takes care of transaction-based transport, caching, both low and high-level format conversions, routing, monitoring, and more; pretty much everything you can think of except the kitchen sink is included in this 'tube'.
So on one side of a transaction, you might have a legacy system which can only import comma-separated data from a file in seven-bit ASCII. On the other we might have a system which includes a Web service which spits out XML in UTF-16. Between them you have this 'tube', which will connect to the webservice, get a bunch of data, convert between the two formats (both hi and lo level) and deliver the data as a file to the target system.
Very nice. Very tempting.
Question is if the old rule of the Internet "Keep the network dumb, move intelligence out from the core towards to edges" applies here.
I think it does.
By making the network smart, the edges will become more and more dependent upon the network's smartness; And since the 'network' (in the example above, the 'tube') is actually a product delivered from a company, all the applications and thus organizations involved will be tightly locked-in to this company... which in MBs case is IBM.
Once it has set its teeth into you organization, how do you rip this code out without tearing your organization apart? But the pragmatist would answer "But why would we want to tear it out in the first place? Its so useful!"
True. But the path to hell is paved with good intentions...
0 comments:
Post a Comment