Hi Dave,
I'd like to know more on the kind of messages that SAM deals with. It
sounds to me like JSON so far, am I wrong?
Yannick
Hi Yannick,
The messages transported by SAM can be in any format, JSON is certainly
possible. The messages might be in JSON, XML, plain text, binary or indeed
a mixture of all of these in one message. Traditionally in the messaging and
queuing world the endpoints have had varying levels of knowledge of the
message format and in fact as long as the endpoints agree on a format
anything can be put in the payload. To help the endpoints be flexible there
are some standard "clues" in the message header on the format being passed
and the sender is free to add any user properties or properties understood
by the underlying messaging system into the header to help.
Some of the older legacy systems that use messaging and queuing use all
manner of nasty data formats that would not be nice but possible to create
and interpret within a PHP script. In this case the message would probably
be sent with the message header property, SAM_TYPE, set to SAM_BYTES to
indicate the format is application dependent. More modern systems might be
JMS compliant in which case messages could well be XML-based and then the
SAM_TYPE header property would be set to SAM_TEXT to indicate this. These
sorts of message would be much easier to create and interpret from within
PHP due to the existing XML capabilities.
The nett of all this is that the message format will depend on the
application that you are sending to or receiving from. SAM should be
capable of transporting most things.
Cheers
Dave