You are viewing an old version of this page. View the current version.

Compare with Current View Page History

Version 1 Next »

Under Construction

This tutorial is a work in progress.

So there's a company, which we'll call Acme. Acme sells widgets, in a fairly unusual way. Their customers have stock rooms with tons of Acme widgets, owned by Acme. When the customer requires a widget, they take it out of the stock room. Then they enter into their own systems (ERP or whatever) that they bought the widget. Then at some point, their systems emit a record of the sale which needs to go to Acme so Acme can bill them for it. Obviously, everyone wants this to be as automated as possible, so there needs to be integration between the customer's system and Acme.

Sadly, Acme's sales people are, technically speaking, doormats. They tell all their prospects, "you can send us the data in whatever format, using whatever protocols, whatever. You just can't change once it's up and running."

The result is pretty much what you'd expect. Taking a random sample of 3 customers:

  • Customer 1: XML over FTP
  • Customer 2: CSV over HTTP
  • Customer 3: Excel via e-mail
  • No labels