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BizTalk 2009 ESB Confusion

I have a little experience with BizTalk and am trying to understand BizTalk 2009 ESB Toolkit 2 without using it. Firstly, I am wondering whether anyone can clear up a couple of concepts for me:

  1. What is the difference between an "on-ramp" and a "receive port"?
  2. Why do you need itineraries, can you not simply create the same using ports and orchestrations? I am obviously missing something here.

A couple of more general questions:

  1. Do all messages still have to go through the Message Box?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

Solution

  • On-ramps

    The on-ramps are web service based receive port but they are a bit different as they accepts generic XML messages. The messages will however have a very special SOAP header (a "envelope" if you will) with all the necessary properties to make for example message itinerary possible, You'll find all the possible header by having look in "EsbEnvGeneric.xsd"

    itineraries

    I like NealWalter reply on this on. I however just like to add the message itinerary approach can potential save a lot of time and development effort. It can make an organizations more agile and ease change in their processes. If we don't have to develop and deploy a whole new orchestration but only change some configuration and use our existing bits that can of course save a lot of time. And this is the big value in a ESB and message itinerary as I see it.

    Message Box

    Messages in BizTalk always have to go via the message box. In the next version MS have been hinting about a low latency scenario in BizTalk - maybe then we can gain a bit more control, But more but for now messages get persisted many times on their way through BizTalk and there is nothing to about that.