What's new in IBM Integration Bus for WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus users?
IBM® Integration Bus is a compatible evolution of WebSphere® Message Broker that is designed to incorporate features that are found in WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. IBM Integration Bus provides a universal integration capability that addresses a wide range of integration scenarios. These scenarios include web services such as SOAP and REST, messaging, database, file, ERP systems, mobile, physical devices, email, custom systems and more.
Message modeling and message processing
- IBM Integration Bus supplies more built-in parsers than WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. For a complete list of body message built-in parsers and header message parsers built-in parsers, see Parsers.
- IBM Integration Bus supports the ACORD AL3, CSV, EDIFACT, FIX, HL7, SWIFT, TLOG, X12 and ISO8583 standards. For more information, see Industry standard formats.
- In IBM Integration Bus, you can use the Data Format Description Language (DFDL) to define the structure of general text and binary formatted data in a way that is independent of the data format. DFDL is a standard of the Open Grid Forum (OGF) that enables powerful data interchange and high-performance data handling. For more information, see Data Format Description Language (DFDL).
- IBM Integration Bus provides a number of mechanisms to model your message data efficiently. For example, you can use an importer to read metadata such as C header files, COBOL copybooks, and EIS metadata, and to create message models from that metadata, or you can create a message model for your SAP data by using DFDL. For more information, see Modeling different data formats.
- IBM Integration Bus provides predefined message models for common industry standard message formats such as SWIFT, EDIFACT, X12, FIX, HL7, and TLOG. For more information, see Modeling different data formats.
- In IBM Integration Bus, you can reuse one message model schema file or message definition file by using one of the two mechanisms that XML schema provides to reuse message definition files: import and include. For more information, see Reusing message model files.
- IBM Integration Bus supports lazy parsing for a wide range of formats, for example all message formats supported by DFDL. This reduces both the amount of processing performed and the memory consumption for a wide range of integration scenarios. WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus only supports lazy parsing for XML data.
Patterns framework
IBM Integration Bus provides more built-in patterns that speed up the process of implementing your integration solutions. In addition, you can create your own user-defined patterns to extend the functionality of IBM Integration Bus. IBM Integration Bus provides the capabilities to graphically define and contribute your own patterns to the Patterns Explorer.
Operational management
- Allows system administrators to monitor and adjust the speed at which messages are processed.
- Allows system administrators to control the actions to take on unresponsive flows and threads.
- Allows system administrators to specify a workload management policy.
.NET
- To interact with other applications that have .NET or Component Object Model (COM) interfaces and perform tasks such as message enrichment, by obtaining data from these applications, you can use the .NETCompute.
- You can call .NET methods directly from ESQL. For more information, see CREATE FUNCTION statement and CREATE PROCEDURE statement.
- To enable Microsoft applications to be rapidly integrated with IBM Integration Bus integration solutions, you can use prebuilt patterns for Microsoft Dynamics CRM that allow transformation and synchronization of client data with another CRM application.
- To receive data from other applications that have Microsoft .NET or Component Object Model (COM) interfaces, you can use a .NETInput node.
File processing
In IBM Integration Bus, you use message flow nodes to handle data from files. You use a FileInput node to process messages that need to read data from files, a FileOutput node to write messages to files, and a FileRead node to read one record, or the entire contents of a file, from within a message flow.
For more information, see How the integration node processes files.
WebSphere ESB conversion tool
IBM Integration Bus supplies a WebSphere ESB conversion tool that accelerates the conversion of development artifacts created for WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus in WebSphere Integration Developer or IBM Integration Designer to IBM Integration Bus development artifacts.
For more information, see The WebSphere ESB conversion tool and Converting WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus resources by using the WebSphere ESB conversion tool.
Application development differences
When you develop integration solutions in IBM Integration Bus, you must consider the following differences:
Terminology differences
To learn about the terminology differences between IBM Integration Bus and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, see WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus conversion reference.
Runtime environment differences
- IBM Integration Bus does not require WebSphere Application Server, nor does it run inside an Application Server container. It runs as a stand-alone set of operating system processes.