Connection to a service integration bus

An XMS application can connect to a WebSphere Application Server service integration bus either by using a direct TCP/IP connection or by using HTTP over TCP/IP.

The HTTP protocol can be used in situations where a direct TCP/IP connection is not possible. One common situation is when communicating through a firewall, such as when two enterprises exchange messages. Using HTTP to communicate through a firewall is often referred to as HTTP tunneling. HTTP tunneling, however, is inherently slower than using a direct TCP/IP connection because HTTP headers add significantly to the amount of data that is transferred, and because the HTTP protocol requires more communication flows than TCP/IP.

To create a TCP/IP connection, an application can use a connection factory whose XMSC_WPM_TARGET_TRANSPORT_CHAIN property is set to XMSC_WPM_TARGET_TRANSPORT_CHAIN_BASIC. This is the default value of the property. If the connection is created successfully, the XMSC_WPM_CONNECTION_PROTOCOL property of the connection is set to XMSC_WPM_CP_TCP.

To create a connection that uses HTTP, an application must use a connection factory whose XMSC_WPM_TARGET_TRANSPORT_CHAIN property is set to the name of an inbound transport chain, that is configured to use an HTTP transport channel. If the connection is created successfully, the XMSC_WPM_CONNECTION_PROTOCOL property of the connection is set to XMSC_WPM_CP_HTTP. For information about how to configure transport chains, see Configure transport chains in the WebSphere Application Server product documentation.

An application has a similar choice of communication protocols when connecting to a bootstrap server. The XMSC_WPM_PROVIDER_ENDPOINTS property of a connection factory is a sequence of one or more endpoint addresses of bootstrap servers. The bootstrap transport chain component of each endpoint address can be either XMSC_WPM_BOOTSTRAP_TCP, for a TCP/IP connection to a bootstrap server or XMSC_WPM_BOOTSTRAP_HTTP, for a connection that uses HTTP.