BizTalk 2006
This entry was posted on 11/4/2006 9:21 AM and is filed under BizTalk Server.
On October 30, 2006 I heard Mark Berry present at the Atlanta .Net Users Group Meeting on the topic of BizTalk 2006. A good part of the presentation focused on what BizTalk is good for and what it is not good for. Three areas that BizTalk is used for are the following:
1) App to App communication
2) Business to Business communication
3) BPM (Business Process Management) as an SOA Aggregation Layer.
I asked Mark about the use of BizTalk versus Windows Workflow Foundation - how would you know which platform to use for each application. Mark's response was that for workflows within a single app - use WF. For App to App communication - use BizTalk.
Some areas where BizTalk is not particularly well suited are areas that require low latency and functions that can be performed reliably by DTS or SSIS. Every message gets written to BizTalk's internal SQL Server data store so we can guarantee a message is written reliably to disk. A message is written to the database and pushed back out. The process of doing this creates a lot of overhead, which may slow transaction processing time. BizTalk is also glue and middleware - it is not an application platform.
Mark discussed the next (R2) release. It will be an incremental release and include RFID enhancements and an improved EDI adapter.
Out of the box BizTalk 2006 gives you these things:
1) Schemas - message definitions which are xsd style (xml).
2) Orchestrations - GUI to visually describe BPM
3) Pipelines - for normalization of messages. They transform messages into canonical format, for example decryption, encryption, and messaging.
4) Maps - an XSLT generator that take one message type and transform it into another message type.
Overall it was a very informative presentation.
