Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: What is BizTalk?

Author:Yoz Grahame
Posted:5/26/1999; 6:10:40 AM
Topic:What is BizTalk?
Msg #:6718 (In response to 6702)
Prev/Next:6717 / 6719

Okay, with a deeper look at all three I can see that they're not direct competitors, but I can see plenty of potential for stepping on each others' toes.

Biztalk appears to define an XML-wrapper language for any XML document which you want to get from point A to point B, and the XML document has an available schema in XML-Data. Your app wraps the XML in Biztalk, which basically involves putting a few more tags around it. Those tags indicate:
a) what the type of the XML document is
b) what points A and B are (that's what the ROUTE tags are for)
c) the XML document itself (in the Biztalk BODY)
Your app hands the Biztalk-formatted document over to the Biztalk handler (part of the BackOffice server) and forgets about it. You don't need to worry about any transport implementation or details other than the start and end points - the Biztalk components handle that for you. Similarly, on the other end, the Biztalk components receive the document through opaque network activity, parse it for you and hand it over to the receiving app. Done. There's no defined client or server for the developer - it's all peer-to-peer, from what I can see.

This doesn't seem to directly overlap WDDX (which is about transmitting data structures) and ICE (which is a fully-defined spec for content syndication) but I think there's still room for a lot of clashing. MS wants Biztalk to be the method by which all business data XML (e.g. EDI, ICE etc.) is transmitted from one machine to another. Theoretically, you should be able to take either ICE or WDDX, wrap them in Biztalk and be happy. However, are your WDDX/ICE handlers going to be happy with a document wrapped in BizTalk? And more importantly, are they going to be happy with having their transport components replaced by another system? When you buy a WDDX system you tend to get a whole client-server network system that's completely integrated with the XML-handling aspects. Also, from what I can see, BizTalk is just about moving XML documents around, and not about query-response, which is what ICE needs. That would probably be a barrier to implementing ICE using BizTalk (along with the ICE schema being a DTD, not XML-Data).

The main different between BizTalk and WDDX/ICE/XML-RPC is that the latter have *complete* schemas for the document... whatever data you're sending, you have to completely format it using that schema, which can be a pain if you
a) already have your own XML schema that you're using, and
b) want to take advantage of ready-written transport and parsing components to deal with getting it from one place to another and parsing it, because you'd rather spend your coding time on dealing with the data once you've got it.

This is what BizTalk is for - it lets you use whichever schema you like and takes care of transport and parsing for you.

-- Yoz







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