It often occurs to me that a fair number of project managers are inordinately optimistic when it comes to managing the delivery of a project. Given the number of high-profile failures reported in the media, and their own experience, you’d think that we would have learnt to temper our optimism with a healthy dose of realism. Seems not.

Working with different character encodings is almost fun. I do get asked a lot about this kind of thing; my transform doesn’t work, or this EDI document doesn’t parse properly (I suppose the customer thinks that diacritics are allowed in the UNOA character set?); I like to say that the adapter only knows as much about encoding as you do; everything is configurable so your choices (or tacit acceptance of the defaults) will have a huge impact on how the adapter behaves.

JMS is the bread and butter of the adapter; it’s been supported even since it was first released. We use JMS as the backbone of all our community deployments; we aren’t picky about the vendor, so long as it supports JMS 1.0 then the adapter will quite happily work with it. I’ve written previously about JMS Connections and the adapter. Most of time, it just works; the problems that you might be having will be configuration based because the default behaviour just aren’t suitable for your environment.

Recently our integrations team have been deploying some HTTPS enabled adapters to service some customers who wanted to POST requests into our hub infrastructure. Interestingly they encountered a problem which they came to me with. Basically, during testing with one particular customer they found that there was excessive continuous logging which ended up raising a red flag via some our file system monitoring processes (I did have a little chuckle at their work-around initially).

One of the things that we’re always asked is to provide some performance metrics for the adapter. This is always something I’m loathe to do. Raw performance numbers are almost always meaningless in the real world; it depends on too many things, the complexity of your environment, the quality of the network, what type of processing that you’re actually doing.