Benefits of using Pipex

The simplest way for a programmer to integrate two applications is to provide import and export functionality in the applications. Easy for the programmer, but anyone who has had to deal with missed transactions, or worse, double postings, or even worse yet, failed postings, knows how cumbersome this approach can be.

A more sophisticated approach involves polling. If you've solved many application integration problems, you may be familiar with this approach. The sending application writes a transaction file into a directory, while the receiving application polls continuously for the presence of the dropped file, which it subsequently reads and processes. Perhaps, the applications reside on two different machines, or in different locations and the file must be transferred with FTP or by e-mail or another mechanism. This approach hides the transfer from the user, but is more difficult to program, and manage successfully. And, failed postings, missed transactions, and transactions out of sequence can still plague the process, depending on the skill of the programmer at process recovery.

Pipex offers several advantages over both of these approaches:

• Like the polling process, Pipex provides a direct interface between the sending and receiving application.
• Pipex will hold or queue transactions until they can be processed. The sending and receiving process do not have to be running at the same time. For example, sales people can create orders and quotations on a notebook, and the Pipex process will hold transactions until the notebook can be connected to a network.
• Pipex provides a simple graphical user interface for defining the senders (or applications) and receivers (or queues) of data.
• Pipex manages the flow of data, moving messages across a network, a WAN or across the Internet. It queues transactions so that a receiving process cannot be overrun.
• Pipex guarantees delivery and processing of every transaction.
• Pipex is flexible enough to move data using e-mail, removeable disk or modem. You can even add your own message transport methodology to Pipex.
• Pipex provides one interface to the program for sending transactions whether the underlying transport is performed on a real-time network, via floppy disk or dial-up modem. Pipex separates the technical details of the communications network from the application program.
• Pipex simplifies the programming exercise. The Windows implementation of Pipex presents an ActiveX control to the calling process for sending the data, and a simple interface on the receiving end to process the transaction. If the data can be written with OLE DB or ODBC, no code is required on the receiving end.

Read more about the applications of Pipex Message Queue Server.