Protocol conversion / active mediation

[david vabia]

Hello,

I'm looking for a library / framework for protocol conversion / active
mediation. The scenario it should support is at follow:
- some message in protocol A comes to the box from machine A
- we parse the message, get what's important and send it to machine B
via protocol B
- get response from machine B, parse and send it to machine A
-
The main requirements are:
- easily pluginable with new protocols
- "light" (clustering, paging etc. are not required)
- easy to deploy
- mature

Do you know anything like that?

BR

 

[Paul Cager]

Hello,

I'm looking for a library / framework for protocol conversion / active
mediation. The scenario it should support is at follow:
-       some message in protocol A comes to the box from machine A
-       we parse the message, get what's important and send it to machine B
via protocol B
-       get response from machine B, parse and send it to machine A
-      
The main requirements are:
-       easily pluginable with new protocols
-       "light" (clustering, paging etc. are not required)
-       easy to deploy
-       mature

Do you know anything like that?

It might be a much lower-level framework than you are looking for, but
are you aware of Apache Mina http://mina.apache.org/ ? It has
pluggable codecs (that you have to write yourself).

Disclaimer: I no longer use Mina as I found the API somewhat heavy.

 

[Tom Anderson]

I'm looking for a library / framework for protocol conversion / active
mediation. The scenario it should support is at follow:
- some message in protocol A comes to the box from machine A
- we parse the message, get what's important and send it to machine B via protocol B
- get response from machine B, parse and send it to machine A
-
The main requirements are:
- easily pluginable with new protocols
- "light" (clustering, paging etc. are not required)
- easy to deploy
- mature

Do you know anything like that?

No.

I also don't understand what you need a framework for. What does the
framework supply? Not clustering, paging, or etc; not the protocols
themselves. Accepting connections and handing them to the right protocol
handler? That's about a dozen lines of code. What else?

How are these messages arriving? Sockets? JMS?

tom

 

[Martin Gregorie]

I also don't understand what you need a framework for. What does the
framework supply? Not clustering, paging, or etc; not the protocols
themselves. Accepting connections and handing them to the right protocol
handler? That's about a dozen lines of code. What else?

It could be more complex than you think: some should be fairly straight
forward, e.g SWIFT to TCP/IP, but some, such as SNA.LU6 to TCP/IP are
definitely not: think sliding window acknowledgement and multiple
parallel sessions. Others look straight forward until you realise there's
EBCDIC <-> ASCII conversion required: that's not unusual in financial
protocols. If any of the protocols are using multiple sessions you're
quite likely to find that multi-threading is needed as well as some sort
of session mapping strategy.

Typically there isn't much code involved, but getting the design right
before diving into the coding is vital and will save huge amounts of time.

 

[david vabia]

I'm looking for a library / framework for protocol conversion / active

It might be a much lower-level framework than you are looking for, but
are you aware of Apache Mina http://mina.apache.org/ ? It has
pluggable codecs (that you have to write yourself).

Disclaimer: I no longer use Mina as I found the API somewhat heavy.

Thanks. In fact I went a bit further and found that Apache Camel can be
an option (based on this info:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...malization-biztalk-alternatives/229793#229793).
But now I'm wondering how to make it a reliable solution (again, without
reinventing the wheel) by adding queuing, re-tries etc. Via ActiveMQ?

BR,