In a previous post, I discussed a product called BRIDGEWERX, which uses BizTalk server as its COTS middleware engine.  In that post is a diagram of the BRIDGEWERX logical component architecture in which you may have noticed a term called dynamic interrogation.

 

One of the coolest features about BizTalk is that you can dynamically interrogate an application you wish to communicate with on a network and query it to return all of its public (XML) message schemas that can be exchanged with this application.  BizTalk uses an adapter that knows how to communicate with BizTalk on one end and the native interface of the application you want to communicate with on the other end.  Currently there are dozens of third-party adapters available for BizTalk that use this standard interface mechanism, plus several adapters that come out of the box with BizTalk.

 

For example, in BizTalk, through the Visual Studio IDE at design time, I can install a BizTalk adapter that can communicate with SAP.  Through a properties sheet in BizTalk, I can give the adapter a physical address that points to my SAP instance on my network.  I can fill in security credentials that will allow BizTalk to communicate with the SAP application, through the adapter.

 

Still at design time, I can then tell BizTalk, through the adapter, to return all of the message schemas that are available for this specific instance of SAP.  In other words, dynamically interrogate SAPs message interface.  Those message schemas are actually the public message types that I can use to map to other schemas as part of my application integration solution.  For example I can have SAP communicate with Great Plains and exchange financial data, even though the two message formats are different.  BizTalk has a mapping tool that graphically maps one file format to another, but thats another topic.

 

This is a great example of a service oriented architecture (SOA) as through BizTalk and an adapter (bought or built) that knows how to communicate natively with the application, I can expose the public schema messages (i.e. at run-time, instance data) as a service to be consumed by any other application completely location independent.

 

Using BRIDGEWERX (BW) Designer, I can extend this service oriented architecture approach to dynamically interrogate any application in the world.  Think of it this way, through BW Designer, as an on-line modeling tool, I can dynamically interrogate any application in which I have already installed an adapter on a BizTalk server for.  Of course, this means having the right physical addresses and security credentials in place. Even though this is across the web, any competent Network or Security analyst can lock it down and secure the connections without any worries of security breaches.  Its done all of the time.

 

The point is that dynamic interrogation using BRIDGEWERX, and BizTalks middleware engine, can allow any application to communicate messages to any other application, regardless of application type or geographical location.  The fact that I can do this at design time, and with just a browser, allows me to 100% specify up front all of the application integration interactions for my designed solution.  Because of this approach, we can code generate the application integration. Dynamic interrogation is another excellent example of advancing the industrialization of software.