Why we need to use BizTalk to process HL7 Messages? Is there any other alternative rather than BizTalk?
I need exact reason why we need to opt out for BizTalk only...Is there anyother way to Process HL7 Messages?
Q: 'How many ways are there to skin a cat?' A: 'Lots'
There are lots of ways to implement HL7 messaging, which at the end of the day is just a messaging standard (see http://www.hl7.org/ or http://www.hl7.org.uk/). Oracle's WebLogic product has a HL7 adapter, IBM's WebSphere product has a HL7 adapter, iWay has a HL7 adapter etc. etc. etc. or you could 'roll your own' using your favourite language.
Companies usually go with an integration product (BizTalk, WebLogic, Websphere etc.) rather than rolling their own given that these products usually have done the hard-work of implementing HL7 (add whatever other message standard you want here), allowing you to easily interface with that message standard. You also benefit from the additional features of the integration product (in the case of BizTalk, this is redundant messaging, mapping, a WIDE variety of transport adapters, Orchestration, message validation, enterprise grade load-balancing etc.)
Alternatively, you could 'roll your own' for the particular messages you are concerned with in the language of your choice AND then add any of the enterprisey features you need, however this will be a much bigger undertaking that buying an off-the-shelf middleware product that already implements the standard and is likely to be dearer once you have factored in Project Management, Testing etc.
At the end of the day, it comes down to which technology platform you use within your business - are you a Java / .Net / or Other shop? Once you clearly have that defined, look for the middleware product that suits your platform knowledge and evaluate, or 'roll your own'.
Related
The problem is that I need a standard way to serialize and deselialize domain events between different microservices (either by a unique identifier for each type event), so the contract type of these messages must be agnostic to the programming language.
Is there any protocol or standard of communication between the passage of events between microsrevices in order to identify them with queues? What is the best way for you? Or some standard framework for communicating these events on net.Core?
We copy the events as external events into the other services. We also use a shared event model to communicate upcoming changes to everyone. https://eventmodeling.org/posts/what-is-event-modeling/
This is a case of the Publisher/Subscriber model/pattern of events. Usually, an organization may define its own format of an event message, which must be followed by each publisher (domain in this case, such as Customer, Order, Product, Payment, etc.), and then the subscriber app/domain will consume the published event [if Subscribed to].
While there are many options available for implementing this, such as RabitMQ, Azure Service Bus, Azure EventHUb, and open-source Kafka or Azure Event Hubs for Apache Kafka. You may want to 1st align the pub/sub and what contract will work best for your organization (you can always evolve).
Please refer to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/architecture/microservices/multi-container-microservice-net-applications/integration-event-based-microservice-communications for some samples of using RabitMQ if that will interest you.
There are a few new classes in .NET Core for tracing and distributed tracing. See the markdown docs in here:
https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/tree/master/src/System.Diagnostics.DiagnosticSource/src
As an application developer, should we be instrumenting events in our code, such as sales or inventory depletion etc. using DiagnosticListener instances and then either subscribe and route messages to some metrics store or allow tools like Application Insights to automatically subscribe and push these events to the AI cloud?
OR
Should we create our own metrics collecting abstraction and inject/flow it down the stack "as per normal" and pretend I never saw DiagnosticListener?
I have a similar need to publish "health events" to Service Fabric which I could also solve (abstract) using DiagnosticListener instances sprinkled around.
DiagnosticListener intends to decouple library/app from the tracing system: i.e. any library can use DiagnosticSource` to notify any consumer about interesting operations.
Tracing system can dynamically subscribe to such events and get extensive information about the operation.
If you develop an application and use tracing system that supports DiagnostiListener, e.g. ApplicationInsights, you may use either DiagnosticListener to decouple your code from tracing system or use it's API directly. The latter is more efficient as there is no extra adapter that converts your DS events to AppInsights/other tracing systems events. You can also fine-tune these events more easily.
The former is better if you actually want this layer of abstraction.
You can configure AI to use any DiagnosticListener (by specifying includedDiagnosticSourceActivities) .
If you write a library and want to rely on something available on the platform so that any app can use it without bringing new extra dependencies - DiagnosticListener is your best choice.
Also consider that tracing and metrics collection is different, tracing is much heavier and does not assume any aggregation. If you want just custom-metrics/events without in/out-proc correlation, I'd recommend using tracing system APIs directly.
We have two micro-services: Provider and Consumer, both are built independently. Consumer micro-service makes a mistake in how it consumes Provider service (for whatever reason) and as a result, incorrect pact is published to the Pact Broker.
Consumer service build is successful (and can go all the way to release!), but next Provider service build will fail for the wrong reason. So we end up with the broken Provider service build and a broken release of Consumer.
What is the best practice to guard against situations like this?
I was hoping that Pact Broker can trigger the Provider tests automatically when contracts are published and notify Consumers if they fail, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
Thanks!
This is the nature of consumer-driven contracts - the consumer gets a significant say in the API!
As a general rule, if the contract doesn't change, there is no need to run the Provider build, albeit there is currently no easy way to know this in the Broker (see feature request https://github.com/bethesque/pact_broker/issues/48).
As for solutions you could use one or more of the below strategies.
Effective use of code branches
It is of course very important that new assumptions on the contract be validated by the Provider before the Consumer can be safely released. Have branches tested against the Provider before you merge into master.
But most importantly - you must be collaborating closely with the Provider team!
Use source control to detect a modified contract:
If you also checked the master pact files into source control, your CI build could conditionally act - if the contract has changed, you must wait for a green provider build, if not you can safely deploy!
Store in separate repository
If you really want the provider to maintain control, you could store contracts in an intermediate repository or file location managed by the provider. I'd recommend this is a last resort as it negates much of the collaboration pact intends to facilitate.
Use Pact Broker Webhooks:
I was hoping that Pact Broker can trigger the Provider tests automatically when contracts are published and notify Consumers if they fail, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
Yes, this is possible using web hooks on the Pact Broker. You could trigger a build on the Provider as soon as a new contract is submitted to the server.
You could envisage this step working with options 1 and 2.
See Using Pact where the Consumer team is different from the Provider team in our FAQ for more on this use case.
You're spot on, that is one of the current things lacking with the Pact workflow and it's something I've been meaning of working towards once a few other things align.
That being said, in the meantime, this isn't solving your current problem, so I'm going to suggest a potential workaround in your process. Instead of running the test for the consumer, them passing, and then releasing it straight away, you could have the test run on the consumer, then wait for the provider test to come back green before releasing the consumer/provider together. Another way would be to version your provider/consumer interactions (api versioning) so that you can release the consumer beforehand, but isn't "turned on" until the correct version of the provider is released.
None of these solutions are great and I wholeheartedly agree. This is something that I'm quite passionate about and will be working on soon to fix the developer experience with pact broker and releasing the consumer/provider in a better fashion.
Any and all comments are welcome. Cheers.
I think the problem might be caused by the fact that contracts are generated on the consumer side. It means that consumers can modify those contracts how they want. But in the end producer's build will suffer due to incorrect contracts generated by consumers.
Is there any way that contracts are defined by producer? As I think the producer is responsible for maintaining its own contracts. For instance, in case of Spring Cloud Contracts it is recommended to have contacts defined in producer sources (e.g. in the same git repo with producer source code) or in a separate scm repo that can be managed by producer and consumer together.
Does Astoria Service Model only support
ATOM,JSON,XML,XML+HTTP
Are formats like SOAP,WSDL,ASMX outdated? .So when i wish to develop SOA can i ignore SOAP,ASMX,WSDL formats?
I would add to the above answer and say there is in-fact a way to discover the metadata about the Data Services (REST) endpoint. Every endpoint includes a service document (just do a GET on the root of the endpoint) that describes the sets exposed by the service. Further, going to the $metadata endpoint from the root of the service (i.e. http://mydomain/myservice.svc/$metadata) returns an XML metadata document that fully describes the service (the sets, types, properties on types, relationships between sets, and service operations).
No, most definitely not!
ASMX = ASP.NET webservices - this is outdated, it was introduced in .NET 1.0 and basically replaced with WCF in .NET 3.0.
BUT: WCF is definitely NOT outdated! WCF is the Microsoft standard way of communicating between two systems. It uses SOAP (including WSDL and XSD) by default, and this is mature and reliable technology which works well in enterprise scenarios where you need things like data integrity, (human and machine readable) service description through WSDL and service metadata, and so forth. SOAP also offers more advanced features like reliable messaging and transactional support.
REST / ADO.NET Data Services is a more lightweight, easier-to-get-at approach at exposing services, but it's lacking in many ways: there's no unified service description available, so you cannot really "discover" what methods and what datatypes the service offer; either you have knowledge yourself, or the service provider gives you a documentation in plain English, but there's no standard way of describing a REST service to the outside world (yet). Also, you don't really know ahead of time what kind of data that service might return - there's no XML schema to stick to - it's more of a "let's hit the service and see what comes back" approach which might work quite OK in some cases, but not really in larger scale, enterprise-style environments.
So to sum up: the SOAP (WSDL,XSD) vs. REST debate is ongoing, both have their reasons to be, and I don't see one of them replacing the other - they're supplanting one another.
I used to create normal webservices in my websites, and call these services from javascript to make ajax calls.
Now i am learning about Ado Data Services,
My question is:
Does this Ado Data Services can replace my normal webservice in new sites i will create?
And if Yes,
Can i put these Ado Data Services in a separate project "local on the same server" and just reference from my website? "to use the same services for my websites internal use and also give the same services to other websites or services, the same as twitter for example doing"
depends what you want to do , I suggest you read my conversation with Pablo Castro the architect of Ado.Net Data Services
Data Services - Lacking
Here is basically Pablo's words.
I agree that some of these things are quite inconvenient and we're looking at fixing them (e.g. use of custom types in addition to types defined in the input model in order to produce custom result-sets). However, some others are just intrinsic to the nature of Data Services.
The Data Services framework is not a gateway to a database and in general if you need something like that then Data Services will just get in the way. The goal of Data Services is to create a resource model out of an input data model, and expose it with a RESTful interface that exposes the uniform interface, such that every unit of data in the underlying model ("entities") become an addressable resource that can be manipulated with the standard verbs.
Often the actual implementation of a RESTful interface includes more sophisticated behaviors than just doing CRUD over the data under the covers, which need to be defined in a way that doesn't break the uniform interface. That's why the Data Services server runtime has hooks for business logic and validation in the form of query/change interceptors and others. We also acknowledge that it's not always possible or maybe practical to model absolutely everything as resources operated with standard verbs, so we included service operations as a escape-hatch.
Things like joins dilute the abstraction we're trying to create. I'm not saying that they are bad or anything (relational databases without them wouldn't be all that useful), it's just that if what's required for a given application scenario is the full query expressiveness of a relational database to be available at the service boundary, then you can simply exchange queries over the wire (and manage the security implications of that). For joins that can be modeled as association traversals, then data services already has support for them.
I guess this is a long way to say that Data Services is not a solution for every problem that involves exposing data to the web. If you want a RESTful interface over a resource model that matches our underlying data model, then it usually works out well and it will save you a lot of work. If you need a custom inteface or direct access to a database, then Data Services is typically not the right tool and other framework components such as WCF's SOAP and REST support do a great job at that.