Service Message Object (SMO)

As explained in the previous section, the heart of a mediation module is the mediation flow component, which provides the mediation logic, applied to a message as it flows from a service consumer to a provider. Mediation flows operate on a message between a service consumer and service provider. So how do we represent these messages? Also the messages originating from a service consumer and the eventual messages that land up in a service provider may be in different forms. The service consumer may be a Web Services client, but the eventual service provider may expose its capabilities using JDBC and hence require the data to be in a non-XML format. There is a need to represent the message that flows through the mediation flow and hence the Mediation primitives. And this common representation of a message is what a Service Message Object (SMO) does. SMOs provide a common representation of a message that accounts for differing protocols and differing interfaces...