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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

Now on the Acme side, all this has to be converted to a canonical XML format and submitted to the Acme accounting system via JMS. Then the Acme accounting system sends an XML reply via JMS, with a summary of what it processed (e.g. 3 line items accepted, line item #2 in error, total invoice $123.45). Finally, that data needs to be formatted into an e-mail, and sent to a contact at the customer in question ("Dear Joyce, we received an invoice on 1/2/08. We accepted 3 line items totaling $123.45, though there was an error with line items #2 [invalid quantity ordered]. Thank you for your business. Love, Acme.").

So it turns out Camel can handle all this:

  • Listen for HTTP, e-mail, and FTP files
  • Grab attachments from the e-mail messages
  • Convert XML, XLS, and CSV files to a canonical XML format
    • using XSLT, automatic data format conversion, and/or POJOs that write to JAXB objects
  • read and write JMS messages
  • route based on company ID
  • format e-mails using Velocity templates
  • send outgoing e-mail messages

This tutorial will cover all that, plus setting up tests along the way.

High-Level Diagram

Here's more or less what the integration process looks like.

First, the input from the customers to Acme:

And then, the output from Acme to the customers:

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