About this task
It is important to understand the capability and capacity that you require from your system. The capability and capacity of your integration nodes are partly determined by the operation mode in which they are running, and this is determined by the IBM Integration Bus license that you have purchased. For example, Express Edition entitles you to run an integration node in Express mode, in which a subset of capabilities are enabled for use with a single integration server, whereas the full edition of the product enables you to run in Advanced mode with all features enabled and with no limits to the number of resources that you can create and maintain. Alternatively, you might choose to use the Developer Edition, which you can download at no charge and use for evaluative purposes. For more information about the features and modes of operation provided in each edition, see Choosing your IBM Integration Bus edition and operation mode.
It is also important to consider
the most suitable technology for your business; this varies between
projects and organizations, and there are various factors to consider
when assessing your requirements:
- The pool of development skills available. For example, if your
developers are already skilled in the use of ESQL, you might want
to continue using this transformation technology. However, if you
have strong Java™ skills, the
JavaCompute node might be the better choice, rather than having to
teach your Java developers ESQL.
- The ease with which you can teach developers a new development
language. For example, if you have many developers it might be not
be viable to teach all of them ESQL, and you might choose instead
to educate only a few people who can then develop common functions
or procedures.
- The skills of individual people. If your developers have relatively
little experience with IBM Integration Bus,
you might find that the graphical interface provided by the Mapping
node is more suitable than other transformation technologies.
- Asset reuse. If you are an existing user of IBM Integration Bus, you might already have large
amounts of ESQL code that you would like to reuse. You might also
have other resources that you want to reuse, such as Java classes for key business processing, style
sheets, or mappings. You might want to use these as the core of message
flow processing and extend the processing with one of the other technologies.
- Performance. If message throughput is a prime consideration, you
might choose to use ESQL or Java.
For more information about designing your system for optimum performance,
see Message flow design and performance and Code design and performance.
- Solution scalability, cost and flexibility.
You might have an existing network infrastructure that you want
to use, or you might want to take advantage of IBM Integration Bus cloud capabilities. For more
information on choosing a solution for your installation, see Cloud overview.
For more information about factors to consider when planning
your
IBM Integration Bus solution, see the
following topics: