AppFabric Connect

In going through different articles on the internet, I was trying to figure out how BIZTALK Server 2010 will interact with the cloud. It was hard to imagine that Microsoft’s premier and flagship middleware product to be left behind in this cloud frenzy & bingo I found a host of articles that exactly detail this aspect of integration.

Read the original article here. Will be implementing this feature in the coming days and will be sharing my experiences, but before that, its important to get a clear understanding on what can be achieved. Some of the important things that excited me are given below:

BizTalk Server 2010 introduces a new feature “AppFabric Connect”, which enables organizations to use BizTalk capabilities from both Windows Server AppFabric and Windows Azure AppFabric. For Windows Server AppFabric, the focus is to enable developers to leverage the power of the BizTalk LOB Adapters and the BizTalk Mapper from inside Windows Workflow applications. For Windows Azure AppFabric, the “connection” is to use the power of the AppFabric ServiceBus to host service endpoints in the cloud for BizTalk artifacts enabling easy interactions to external parties you need to integrate with without needing complex firewall and security infrastructure .

The first thing you notice is that using appfabric connect, developers will now be able to use BizTalk LOB Adapters and the BizTalk Mapper from inside Windows Workflow applications. That’s cool from a design point of view. I hope the performance of these maps will also improve and we may not have the same memory leakage problems that we had in BizTalk [This can be overcome by running compiled xslt's], but that’s a different topic.

The second thing you’ll notice is that it enables us now to expose our on premise services (that are running in our enterprise behind our company firewall etc), to be exposed (only the service endpoints) on the cloud enabling external entities to use these service. The service execution will be on the servers in the enterprise. Now thats cool !

For On-Premises

AppFabric Connect allows you to create workflow activities that represent these interactions with your LOB systems using the BizTalk LOB Adapter Wizard directly inside your workflow applications. It also allows you to use the BizTalk Mapper inside these applications as well, since schema transformation is a very common activity you will do when interacting with LOB systems.

For Cloud

AppFabric Connect allows you to EXTEND the REACH of your LOB Services into Windows Azure AppFabric. The services RUN on-premises, BUT can be accessed securely and easily through the Cloud. The capabilities of the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control are utilized to publish and secure access to an endpoint definition of your service, the actual calls to the real service are passed to the service that is running on-premise. You provision a service endpoint in the Service Bus, plug this into the BizTalk Adapter Wizard at the appropriate place and that’s it. Now it’s easy to extend your internal integration processes to your customers and partners as web services that “seem” to live in the cloud, but you maintain control using your on-premises infrastructure.

Here is an article that details on how to work with AppFabric Connect.

AppFabric Connect uses Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) activities to programmatically access BizTalk Server’s LOB connectivity and data transformation capabilities. This enables users to easily create new composite applications using the WF model, which can be deployed, hosted and managed in Windows Server AppFabric. AppFabric Connect also accomodates a class of scenarios (such as Web-based queries) that can utilize BizTalk Server 2010 functionality from a WF application hosted in IIS rather than from a BizTalk Server application running in a BizTalk Server host instance. This provides flexibility for WF developers that may not want or need other BizTalk Server functionality and also maximizes the use of available resources at runtime; the overhead required to run WF applications hosted in IIS is significantly less than the overhead required to run applications hosted in the BizTalk Server runtime

Here is a link which details on how to install and enable this feature. I’ll post updates as soon as I get my hands dirty on it.

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