Motivation

In our effort to make project Fuji simpler and more productive we were looking for way to simplify how composite applications are defined.

What attracted us to a domain specific language (DSL) is:

• Makes it feasible to type from text editor, focus is

• Easier to read without angle brackets “noise” in XML
• Easy to add tooling on top
• Is targeted at the specific problems in the domain

There does not seem to be a concise language out there that solves this domain, hence we created a community to help define such as DSL.

Integration Flow Language Overview

• Declare the concrete routing ("flow") of messages between services; whether these services are within the ESB or external.
  • External services can be legacy systems exposed as services via adapters
• Provide for a productive work-flow to build SOA based applications
  • including support for top-down, bottom-up and meet-in-the-middle approaches and without the need for complex tooling; a text editor should suffice

To try and achieve this IFL takes a message based integration view; including

• Basic Message Routing constructs
• A "Pipes and Filters" design pattern construct (chain invocations)
• Leverages enterprise integration patterns principles

Example

This example receives entries from an RSS feed, filters out unwanted entries in a JRuby filter, then fowards the message in parallel to an instant messaging client and a file archive.

   rss "cnnfeed"
   jruby "filter"
   xmpp "IM"
   file "archive"

   route do
      from "cnnfeed"
      to "filter"
      broadcast do 
         route to "IM"
         route to "archive"
      end   
   end

More Details

IFL Specification IFL Sample Scenarios IFL FAQ

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This page (revision-1) was last changed on 04-May-08 16:25 PM, -0700 by AndiEgloff.

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