page_title: IBM App Connect Enterprise
section_title: How IBM Integration Bus works
hierarchical_section_title: IBM App Connect Enterprise / How IBM Integration Bus works
context_page_description: IBM App Connect Enterprise is IBM's integration broker from the WebSphere product family that allows business information to flow between disparate applications across multiple hardware and software platforms. Rules can be applied to the data flowing through the message broker to route and transform the information. The product is an Enterprise Service Bus supplying a communication channel between applications and services in a service-oriented architecture.
  IBM ACE provides capabilities to build solutions needed to support diverse integration requirements through a set of connectors to a range of data sources, including packaged applications, files, mobile devices, messaging systems, and databases. A benefit of using IBM ACE is that the tool enables existing applications for Web Services without costly legacy application rewrites. ACE avoids the point-to-point strain on development resources by connecting any application or service over multiple protocols, including SOAP, HTTP and JMS.
context_section_description: A SOA developer defines message flows in the IBM Integration Toolkit by including a number of message flow nodes, each of which represents a set of actions that define a processing step. The way in which the message flow nodes are joined together determine which processing steps are carried out, in which order, and under which conditions. A message flow includes an input node that provides the source of the messages that are processed, which can be processed in one or more ways, and optionally deliver it through one or more output nodes. The message is received as a bit stream, without representational structure or format, and is converted by a parser into a tree structure that is used internally in the message flow. Before the message is delivered to a final destination, it is converted back into a bit stream.
  IBM Integration Bus supports a wide variety of data formats, including standards-based formats (such as XML, DFDL, and JSON), industry formats (such as HL7, EDI and SWIFT), and custom formats. A comprehensive range of operations can be performed on data, including routing, filtering, enrichment, multicast for publish-subscribe, sequencing, and aggregation. These flexible integration capabilities are able to support the customer's choice of solution architecture, including service-oriented, event-oriented, data-driven, and file-based (batch or real-time). IBM Integration Bus unifies the Business Process Management grid, providing the workhorse behind how to do something, taking directions from other BPM tooling which tells IBM Integration Bus what to do.
  IBM Integration Bus includes a set of performance monitoring tools that is visually portray current server throughput rates, showing various metrics such as elapsed and CPU time in ways that immediately draw attention to performance bottlenecks and spikes in demand. You can drill down into granular details, such as rates for individual connectors, and the tools enable you to correlate performance information with configuration changes so that you can quickly determine the performance impact of specific configuration changes.
  In version 7 and earlier, the primary way general text and binary messages were modeled and parsed was through a container called a message set and associated 'MRM' parser. From version 8 onwards such messages are modeled and parsed using a new open technology called DFDL from the Open Grid Forum. This is IBM's strategic technology for modeling and parsing general text and binary data. The MRM parser and message sets remain a fully supported part of the product; in order to use message sets, a developer must enable them as they are disabled by default to encourage the adoption of the DFDL technology.
  IBM Integration Bus supports policy-driven traffic shaping that enables greater visibility for system administrators and operational control over workload. Traffic shaping enables system administrators to meet the demands when the quantity of new endpoints (such as mobile and cloud applications) exponentially increases by adjusting available system resources to meet that new demand, delay or redirect the traffic to cope with load spikes. The traffic monitoring enables notifications to system administrators and other business stakeholders which increases business awareness and enables trend discovery.
caption: How an ESB simplifies adding new applications to the enterprise.