Transformation of the messages is one of the key functionalities provided by the middleware systems. There is a lot of existing and production-ready solutions which can be applied to the majority of the business problems. The most of the serious business issues require quite complex messaging solutions. And when integration infrastructure begins to grow, maintainability of the message routing structure becomes an issue.
One of the main factors affecting the complexity of the middleware solution, is the necessity of including business rules in the messages routing structure. Business requirements use to change and such changes propagate to the entire structure of the integration architecture. Floating requirements in the software system always generate costs, but changes in the messaging infrastructure are one of the most expensive ones.
What integration architect can do to minimize the costs following changing business requirements, is to apply the Separation Of Concerns principle between business logic and the messaging infrastructure.
The area of messaging that heavily depends on business logic is message transformation. Operation that changes message (i.e. perform enriching, filtering, normalization, etc.) usually performs such task with close cooperation with the business components of the system. Message transformation would be then an excellent target of optimization by applying Separation of Concerns principle.
In next posts I'll focus on the message enriching operations performed on the messaging infrastructure. I'll write about patterns that can be applied to this kind of transformations. And of course provide possible implementation created in Java language backed by the Apache Camel and JBoss Drools frameworks.
Stay tuned.
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