Receiving / Sending information to a middleware product

[iseriesSimon]

Hi,

I'm a long time RPG Analyst (30yrs!!) who needs to learn / understand how a middleware product should best send information requests and receive the data. Our company is developing a customer portal and hence, there are many different types of 'requests' to be designed ie Customer details, Invoice History, etc.

They are using a middleware product to effectively transfer information between the iseries and customer portal.

My plan is to code in RPGILE each 'request' program, which would receive the input parameters and then return a JSON format string as a return parameter, which I believe I could easily code / create. We had performed a test with the middleware product to confirm it could send a request and receive the response as text in an output parameter which worked fine.

I believe that I could also place my return data result into a iSeries DB2 file, then have the middleware read and automatically convert it to JSON format, which would be easier.

I would very much appreciate any thoughts/recommendations with using either method above. Thank you.

[Prototype]

Re: Receiving / Sending information to a middleware product

hi,
Not sure if this is helpful, but I thought, I would share what we are doing in our Applications.

We have used data queues in past, for our middleware interface (A 3rd Party Rating Engine). We had API's written in RPG-ILE to send/recieve data for the same. All of these APi's were integrated with SQL Stored Procedures.

We also used SQL tables to store requests/responses, as at times we wanted to see the outgoing requests and incoming responses for troubleshooting purposes.

We also had XML parsers written in RPGL-ILE to send data in XML format to standardize it with other applications within the enterprise which were also using the same middleware interface. (XML is the standard we are following)

But it looks like your middleware interface (whatever it is) wants you to send data in JSON format, however for the same, you may want to write the parser or like you said have it done by Middleware itself.

Very important point which could save a lot of pain in the future - No Business Logic in Middleware layer (we learned it the hard way )

You may also want to look at multi-threading model if expected load is going to be huge.