Re: opinions - utilizing more of what the i has to offer

I get the impression that Mulesoft engages at the CIO level because their
sales pitch and the scope of their Anypoint Platform is for the entire
enterprise and data exchange partners. Large enterprises generally have a
lot of silo'd systems and databases that would benefit from web-service
integration. The sales pitch is for a single platform that integrates them
all, using the same tools and interfaces. That includes a centralized
repository for every team on every silo'd system to document and publish
their web services, build a web-service ecosystem and community. If that
was the reason for acquiring Anypoint Platform, then I can see how the
powers that be might push back on a competing alternative. If that's what
happened, maybe the best one could do would be to build or buy an IBM i
"connector" for Anypoint Platform. One that would facilitate the interface
between your IBM i applications and databases and Anypoint web services.

That said, the whole movement to web services was something of a rejection
of ESB architecture. Under an ESB paradigm, silo'd systems are required to
communicate with an ESB and accept callbacks from the ESB. Web services in
contrast had silo'd systems implementing their own HTTP servers and
accepting connections from any client. The middleman (message broker) was
eliminated under the web-services paradigm. If a silo'd system were down,
then connection requests from clients would simply fail, and the client
would have to try again later.




On Mon, Feb 3, 2020 at 12:21 PM Evan Harris <auctionitis@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If you are using an ESB like Mule it makes a certain amount of sense to
centralise and organise communications through it.
Have a large number of directly communicating systems can quickly become
very hard to unravel and manage when things change. Organising all data
exchanges through the one broker can help unravel this.

Take for example, a situation where system a is communicating directly with
system b.
If system b is replaced with system c, then both system a and system c
probably need to make changes.
With a broker then the changes should be confined to system c.
There's also the security aspect that if all external communications are
through the broker then (theoretically) it's easier to secure and manage.