Technical detail
Media Extender for WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus provides "media-aware" service mediation facilities that can be used as components of IBM's Media Hub Solution Framework. They form part of a solution to enable business transformation by linking business and content systems together for effective media management. It can radically simplify and optimize the construction of media-oriented integration projects and workflows. The three mediation primitives can be used to enable complex decision making based on media formats, service connectivity, and resource availability. The primitives are programmed using WebSphere Integration Developer, resulting in customized ESB mediations. When deployed into WebSphere ESB, these mediations dynamically resolve detailed media transformation and movement requirements. They can be used as simple services in business workflow models, hiding the complexity of media processing.
Media Extender for WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus delivers three mediation primitives that can be exploited in mediation flows:
Service Lookup - Locate service implementations in a services registry. Sensitivity to media formats described by MPEG-21 is built into the lookup process.
Rule Evaluation - Calculation (based on MPEG-21 media metadata) of additional mediation steps required before the final service call. Actions are configured based on awareness of media formats and available transport protocols.
Dynamic Selection - select from candidate service implementations, based on dynamic performance information.
Service Lookup and Rule Evaluation use service metadata that can be stored in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. Dynamic Selection and Rule Evaluation use a digest of information provided by an external monitoring system.
As an illustration of the use of the primitives, the following are also provided:
- Simple file-based registry of sample service metadata.
- Mediation flows representing mediated services relevant to media management:
- Transcoder - Lookup of Transcoder suitable to make media acceptable to target services.
- Repository - Storage/retrieval of media, and illustrating the use of Rule Evaluation to determine and invoke Datamover and Transcoding services before calling the Repository.
Use Media Extender for WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus to radically simplify and optimize the construction of media-oriented integration projects and workflows.
Media Extender for WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus helps integrate existing media-oriented software platforms and media assets using industry-standard service oriented architecture. They can be used as part of a strategy to achieve business efficiency and agility in the media industry.

