EDI Vs ESB

[kri shan]

How EDI(Electronic Data Interchange) products(like IBM MQSeries Workflow) are different from ESB(Enterprise service Bus) products(like WebSphere Service bus,..) ?

[Marco Ehrentreich]

Hi Kri,

although I don't have experience with IBM products, I think the IBM MQSeries is simply a messaging solution based on JMS where data between systems are exchanged via messages.

Typical ESBs take this one step further and offer a solution to connect many heterogeneous systems to exchange data. JMS is only one possible transport protocol for well-know ESBs. There are many other protocol providers which can be used to connect applications to an ESB and "talk" to other applications via HTTP, XMPP, FTP, SMTP, JMS, TCP/IP and many more. All protocol components translate message data as needed to and from the common protocol which is used on the bus itself. The advantage is that no application has to care about the protocol other applications use as long as there's a component for its own protocol to connect it to the ESB.

Marco

p.s.: Of course this was only a very short summary of all the hype about ESB and SOA ;-)

[kri shan]

Which is the right technology option for transfering data from legacy system(Mainframe) to J2EE system ----- MqSeriesWorflow (or) ESB ?

[Marco Ehrentreich]

I don't think that there THE right technology to achieve any particular task. It always depends on many thing and especially on your requirements.

In this case without knowing details I'd take a look at ESBs. It's currently the most flexible way to connect different systems to exchange data. If you would take the message based approach with only JMS, you wouldn't gain anything in my opinion and the solution wouldn't be less complex. Moreover you probably would have to write more code "by hand" to interconnect the mainframe and the J2EE system.

On the other hand an ESB gives you the choice to select between different ready-to-use components to connect a system to the bus. Of course you have to figure out what's the best way to connect to the mainframe application. Unfortunately I don't have any experience with mainframes, so I can't give you any good advices. Maybe you should have a look at the homepages of well known ESB solutions if there are components you could use out-of-the-box to connect the mainframe to the ESB. For the J2EE it should be easy to use an existing connector component. For example JMS should be a good choice for this part of your system.

Marco