CME writing CSV reports which are translated into FpML
So you’ve read Enterprise Patterns, and understood at least half of it. You’ve either finally got Eclipse working, or downloaded last week’s service pack for Visual Studio. You’re ready to write your first enterprise messaging solution – but what’s it really like?
Here’s our hitchhiker’s guide to some of the realities of enterprise messaging:
1. You will spend a month designing an adapter framework
2. You will wish you had put more logging in your code
3. You will wish you could read messages on the wire
4. You will create an Excel document that shows how a single data field is mapped between seven systems
5. You will say ‘how hard can it be to write a messaging system?’
6. You will curse the ancient 1970s system that you have to integrate with, that the correlation pattern could have been named after.
7. You will have to add a field to your signed-off-in-blood message that was supposed to include every conceivable option
8. You will be asked to transfer Field A in System A to Field B in System B via your pristine common message format. No-one will be able to explain what this field is, but at the same time, it will be vitally important.
9. You will attempt to draw your system in PowerPoint, and switch to Visio because there’s not enough space on the page.
10. You will address a requirements change by renaming a queue or spinning up a new adapter, remember why you did this in the first place, and forget all the misery it took getting here.
We’ll fill out each of these topics in more detail over the coming weeks.