Introduction to Mediation
Mediation involves virtualizing and managing service interactions between communicating participants.
Mediation is part of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for applications. ActiveMatrix implements a component-based platform to implement SOA within an enterprise.
- Shields service consumers from the service provider’s physical location from both the design-time and run-time perspective.
- Is responsible for delivering requests to a service provider.
- Provides a mechanism for handling changing service requirements.
- Service providers can respond to requests delivered by mediation components without needing to know the point of origin of the message.
The below example shows a mediation component that provides approvals for loan applications. The existing loan service might require credit scores, loan amount, employment history, and so on. To enable quick turnaround for smaller loans, you might want to provide a new service that approves loan requests for under $50,000 for all applicants with credit scores above 700.
Instead of rewriting your existing service to handle new types of requests, a mediation component can accept requests that contain information from the loan requestor and then submit the request to the appropriate service for approval.
Using the Mediation Flow Editor, you can easily create mediation components that operate within the SOA-based ActiveMatrix platform.