Strategic Thought

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 Product History

The Files Gateway is part of the Active Integrator product line, designed, written and marketed by Strategic Thought Limited. The Files Gateway uses the reliability of IBM WebSphere MQ to transport files between applications. It will detect files created by any external application and move them onto a designated message queue. Conversely it will convert WebSphere MQ messages into files, placing these in a specified directory.

The Files Gateway provides a very rich set of functionality around this simple premise, from preventing files from being sent before they are ready, to providing a comprehensive audit trail of messages transferred. Furthermore, the Gateway is capable of handling any transfers which cannot be completed (for example, if an MQ Queue Manager fails).

The product is sold as “COTS+”, that is “Commercial-Off-The-Shelf” software which can be enhanced as needed by Strategic Thought. By offering Active Integrator as COTS+ we are able to enhance the product to satisfy any additional customer requirements which are not catered for in the base product. All changes made in this way become part of the ongoing product and are fully supported.

Although there are many ways in which the Files Gateway can be used within a middleware environment, there are two very specific business problems which it is most often used to solve:

Legacy Application Integration
Most legacy systems are unable to connect natively to an MQ infrastructure – however they can often communicate using a file based interface. Active Integrator - Files Gateway provides a reliable communication medium between legacy applications and WebSphere MQ without writing bespoke connectors or making invasive changes to application code. This allows our customers to quickly and efficiently connect these legacy applications both to each other and to other systems within the MQ infrastructure, leveraging the reliability and assured once-only message delivery inherent within WebSphere MQ.

Replacement of Automated FTP Transfers
Many our clients with a need to automatically transfer files across their network attempt to implement this functionality using FTP, even despite in some cases already having an WebSphere MQ infrastructure in place. Typically in these circumstances a bespoke script or application would be used to send the file over the network using the FTP protocol.

However there are many problems that can occur when using a mechanism like this, for example:

• If the FTP script starts before the file is completely written it can transfer an incomplete file.
  disk space on the target computer can run out so that FTP is interrupted and only a part of the file is transferred.
• When a file is transferred it will typically overwrite a file of the same name in a target directory.  If that file has not been processed then the data in it is lost, without any alert being generated.
• The receiving application may or may not be able to detect a partially transmitted file and may process the damaged file, but then re-process the re-transmitted file so that data is repeated.
• Should there an interruption in the connectivity between the sending and receiving systems, the FTP script will generally fail with a connection error.
• While it is possible to engineer FTP scripts to address all of these, it is seldom that there is complete protection against these scenarios and the potential for error is hence extremely high. Therefore for production data transfer where the messages are high-value and/or business-critical, this solution cannot be relied upon.

The Files Gateway scores over FTP in a number of areas:

• It uses Websphere MQ as the transport. This benefits from the inherent assured once-only message delivery that MQ provides. File transfers can therefore integrate properly into an MQ environment.
• The Files Gateway is written to the highest quality standards, and is in production use at many client sites with critical data running through it daily. It is proven to be a stable and reliable platform. A solution using FTP would have to be written from scratch, and would not give the flexibility nor the reliability of the Files Gateway.
• Since the Files Gateway already exists, it can be installed in a new customer site with very little lead-time. If customisation is required this could still be done and tested in a fraction of the time it would take to construct a bespoke system to production quality.