The Cisco® ACE Application Control Engine Extensible Markup Language (XML) Gateway secures, simplifies, and scales XML initiatives by centralizing integration, security, and control in reliable, policy-controlled network devices. Developers maximize productivity-building services, and applications run those services with wire-speed efficiency and reusability, opening the way for dramatic business cost and time savings from the wide-scale adoption of XML-based integration.
The Cisco ACE XML Gateway easily extends to address non-XML and nonstandard XML formats through integration with Contivo solutions. Contivo solutions complement the powerful performance of the Cisco ACE XML Gateway and allow you to use the Cisco solution to deliver more services to more projects, even services for older, non-XML data. Contivo solutions simplify the development of transforms and schemas to help you get the most from the Cisco ACE XML Gateway.
Combine Best-in-Class Data Design and Operational Environments
Contivo and Cisco provide organizations with a complete XML messaging and integration solution that combines exceptionally fast XML processing technology with world-class data design technology. The combined solution enables you to overcome middleware and application-based integration bottlenecks with network-based integration services that significantly reduce integration system costs, make full use of XML in complex business processes, and provide a high-performance entry point for older data.
Contivo and Cisco provide powerful support for difficult non-XML data constructs as well as extensions to Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) and Java data transformations to maximize design flexibility. Primary features of the solution include graphical drag-and-drop mapping, testing, and exception handling, and support for non-XML data, error management, security, and content-based routing.
The result of the Cisco and Contivo collaboration is a solution that simplifies development and deployment of network services. Customers benefit from faster deployment of XML across more business processes and support for older systems and formats.
Accelerate Service Provisioning and Deployment
Deploying your Cisco ACE XML Gateway is simple: insert it and let it autodiscover services and enforce integration, routing, and security policies to maintain reliability, security, and scalability of XML services. The Cisco solution enables you to configure service-specific policies that are content and context sensitive. For transformation policies, this means describing your data sources and then mapping the relationships between the input and output data fields. The mapping has to then be tested and deployed. Contivo provides a graphical, drag-and-drop interface to simplify these data mappings and generate outputs that can be run efficiently in the Cisco solution.
Simplify XML Schema Development
Cisco delivers exceptionally fast XML Schema validation and patented preprocessing of XML Schemas. With the Contivo solution, customers can more quickly develop the schemas that the Cisco solution uses. The vocabulary in Contivo Analyst simplifies development of a set of XML Schemas to represent all your service interfaces. The Contivo Vocabulary Management Solution (VMS) learns about relationships with each map to save you time and effort on each additional map. With Contivo, you save more every time you deploy a new service.
Support Older Systems
Cisco ACE XML Gateways are typically restricted to applications that support XML data. Older systems typically lack support for XML interfaces and must be modified to take advantage of XML appliances.
With the Contivo and Cisco solution, older systems do not need to be modified. As a result, you can now process flat- and fixed-file formats on Cisco ACE XML Gateways and take advantage of network-based reliability, application integration, security, and performance.
Support Industry Standards
Industry-standard document formats are generally designed by a consortium of companies either within a specific industry or within industries that need to address concerns of consistently representing critical information specific to that industry's business processes.
Examples of standards are Open Applications Group, Inc.'s, OAGi Business Object Documents (BODs); RosettaNet's Partner Interface Processes (PIPs); Electronic Industry Data Exchange (EIDX) Group for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) (X12 and EDIFACT); XML Common business Library (xCBL); Petroleum Industry Data Exchange (PIDX) for the petroleum industry; Chemical Industry Data Exchange (CIDX) for the chemical industry; Common Information Model (CIM) for the utilities and telco industries; Financial products Markup Language (FpML), Financial Information eXchange (FIX), and Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) for financial services; and Health Level 7 (HL7) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for healthcare.
Industry standards typically present the following challenges:
• Understanding and using an industry standard can be complicated, as in the following examples:
– EDI is a very rigid standard, and a user must have extensive knowledge of EDI before starting any integration work. Such standards can also be difficult to extend.
– OAG supports the most complex and extensible schemas being created today, as a result of multiple namespaces and schema overlays. However, a full OAG interface can be difficult to understand, and version control can be difficult to maintain.
• Most proprietary middleware platform vendors claim that they support all industry standards, but the depth and flexibility of that support is questionable. If a middleware platform only partly supports the required standards, users waste a lot of time and money completing their projects.
By taking control of your integration projects that involve industry standards, you can maximize your capability to deliver results on time and within budget.
How the Cisco and Contivo Solution Works
With the Contivo design environment, XSLT data transforms and Java objects can be deployed directly to the Cisco ACE XML Gateway. Business analysts use the Contivo design-time solution to do the following:
Describe system interfaces with precise technical metadata.
• Map data between input and output interfaces.
• Test interfaces and transforms interactively prior to deployment.
• Deploy extended Java and XSLT transforms to the Cisco ACE XML Gateway.
Describe
Services are defined by the data formats they accept and deliver along with the processes they support and technical connection details. The data formats must be described using precise technical metadata, typically using XML Schemas.
For non-XML data, you can use Contivo Legacy Integrator to create new definitions or import one from the many supported metadata formats, including COBOL copybooks, Guideline XML (gXML) for EDI, and database tables. Within Contivo Analyst, non-XML metadata can be validated against sample payload data, a check that is invaluable when working with poorly documented proprietary data formats.
Contivo Builder is optimized for development of the metadata format most commonly supported for service definitions, XML Schemas. With Contivo Builder, you use a human-friendly vocabulary to describe your data requirements and then simply generate an XML Schema. The vocabulary approach simplifies development and reduces errors.
Map
Mapping identifies relationships between service input and output interfaces and the transformation rules to be applied by the network service. With Contivo Analyst, mapping relationships and transformation rules can be graphically identified and applied, without the need to manually create and edit XSLT or Java objects.
With Contivo VMS and Analyst, mapping is accelerated using automapping and autoruling. Automapping uses knowledge gained from previous mappings to automatically identify relationships, and autoruling supplies transformation instructions that are computed according the interface definition's data-type details or retrieved from the rules library.
Contivo VMS includes a repository to help ensure that the interfaces and maps are properly maintained and easily shared across the entire development environment. Contivo VMS also has features to help you handle change. As your service deployments grow and change, you can quickly accommodate upgrades to existing maps using a wizard that helps you resolve differences and alerts you to specific trouble spots that require manual resolution. The upgrade wizard dramatically simplifies response to change.
Test
Network service deployment can be seriously delayed by the time-consuming testing and debugging processes common to most development environments. Contivo Analyst includes a robust testing studio that provides an interactive environment for importing test data and viewing and saving the results. Debugging is facilitated with dynamic input and output and rules tracing, single-step execution, and breakpoints. At any time, you can return to the input, output, or map displays to quickly make corrections.
Figure 1. Cisco ACE XML Gateway and Contivo Solution
Deploy
After mappings are tested and complete, the next step is to generate code as XSLT and Java transforms. The generated code can be processed in the Cisco ACE XML Gateway at wire speed. See Figure 1.
Benefits of Using a Combined Contivo and Cisco Solution
• Couple an exceptionally high performance design environment with an exceptionally high performance operational environment. No throughput or latency penalties are exacted for a standards-based approach to transformation flexibility and schema validation.
• All data assets, whether binary, older system, or XML, are processed and managed alike, simplifying training and process development.
• Achieve platform independence. Manual approaches to creating schemas and transforms result in code specific to the features and extensions of that platform. The Contivo design solution isolates these dependencies, allowing schemas and maps to be recompiled for a variety of middleware, application server, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) platforms. The Cisco ACE XML Gateway preprocesses these XML Schemas and maximizes the speed at which XML messages are validated against them.
Conclusion
A combined Contivo and Cisco solution simplifies deployment of high-performance XML message transformation services: XML to XML, or XML to other data formats. The combined solution reduces operating costs and complexity, enables faster deployment across more services, and supports older, non-XML-aware applications.
