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Set your data free to flow where needed when needed and across virtually any communication technology

The OpenSplice Gateway (previously called Project BlendBox) is a high performance, extensible and configurable protocol gateway framework transparently bridging across communication technologies while adapting format, content and Quality of Service.

The System Integration Challenge

An increasing number of mission- and business-critical systems rely on the Object Management Group (OMG) Data Distribution Service for Real-time Systems (DDS) as the technology for distributing and managing data. DDS trivializes systems integration in those cases where a shared data model exists. Yet, integrating DDS-based systems that rely on different information models, or DDS-based systems with systems that use other technologies is today performed either point-to-point, or taking advantage of integration technologies such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). None of these approaches is optimal for mission- or business-critical applications because of the quadratic complexity of point-to-point integration, and because of the inefficiency and lack of Quality of Service (QoS) preservation and transformation of ESBs. With the trend toward systems of systems and the increasing need for sharing information across multiple systems and technologies these limitations are no longer sustainable either from a cost or from a time to-market perspective.

The OpenSplice Gateway

The OpenSplice Gateway addresses the problem of making data seamlessly flow across systems and technologies while adapting format, content, and QoS. The OpenSplice Gateway is the best choice for integrating OMG DDS based systems with other messaging technologies, such as JMS, as well as for integrating with proprietary and Web Technologies such as W3C Web Services and RESTful Web Services.

Blending Technologies to Unleash your Data

The OpenSplice Gateway transparently bridges data across standards-based and proprietary technologies...

A Framework of Pluggable Transports

The OpenSplice Gateway supports, off-the-shelf, a set of standard transports, such as the OpenSplice DDS Real-Time Wire Protocol, the OMG DDSI/RTPS interoperable wire protocol, the upcoming Ultra-Large Scale DDSI, as well as transports that are standard in Enterprise and Web applications such as W3C and RESTful Web-Services. In addition, the OpenSplice Gateway provides a framework for developing connectors to other transports, thus greatly simplifying the integration of systems based on custom or proprietary technologies.

QoS-Enabled Routing and transformation Engine

At the heart of the OpenSplice Gateway there is a very efficient Routing and Transformation Engine that can manipulate the data format, transform its content and adapt the QoS between the incoming and outgoing data-flows. Efficient format and content transformation are key to gluing systems together. QoS adaptation is fundamental to ensure that the impedance mismatch existing between systems is bridged. For instance, when integrating systems it is often necessary to perform down-sampling, compression, or even to use different distribution protocols to deal with different network infrastructures. When bridging across technologies it might be necessary to translate QoS, likewise when receiving data from technologies, such as Web Services, that do not support QoS, it is important to decide which QoS should be mapped to the received information. The OpenSplice Gateway allows you to deal with all these concerns.

High Performance

The OpenSplice Gateway has been designed ground-up to target systems that require high performance. Its architecture minimizes the overhead introduced by the extra-hop and ensures that the OpenSplice Gateway can easily take advantage of modern multi-core architectures for keeping up with high throughput systems.

Simple to Deploy and Configure

Integrating systems with the OpenSplice Gateway is very simple as it does not impose any impact or changes on your existing systems. At the extreme you could have your two systems running and integrate them with the OpenSplice Gateway without ever stopping them. The configuration of the OpenSplice Gateway requires you to specify the information that has to be bridged, the transport over which it has to be made available, and the format, content and QoS transformation that should be applied. This information can be specified with the OpenSplice Gateway Domain Specific Language, or via Java, Scala, or even Java-Scripts.

An Example

• The OpenSplice Gateway  mediates from DDS to over 80 technologies

Click Here to View the Introducing the OpenSplice Gateway On-Demand Webcast.

Click Here to Download a 30 Day Evaluation of the OpenSplice DDS Gateway.

OpenSplice DBMSConnect is an optional commercial pluggable service of OpenSplice DDS that provides seamless integration of the real-time DDS and the non/near real-time enterprise DBMS domains.

Where (Relational) databases play an essential role to maintain and deliver typically non- or near-real-time ‘enterprise’ information in mission systems, OpenSplice targets the real-time edge of the spectrum of distributing and providing ‘the right information at the right place at the right time’ by providing a Quality-Of-Service (QoS) aware ‘real-time information backbone’. The typical ‘type’ of information traditionally differs in the various mission-system ‘domains’ such as equipment-control, sensor-data fusion for awareness and planning and monitoring. Yet trends in these distributed decision systems to take into account more and more information from more and more local/real-time as well as remote/non-real-time information sources are clearly demanding these ‘boundaries’ between information-stores and real-time data distribution to be lifted.

OpenSplice DBMSConnect answers this challenge as it:

• Transparently ‘connects’ the real-time DDS ‘information backbone’ to one or more ‘enterprise’ databases
• Allows both enterprise as well as embedded/real-time applications to access and share data in the most ‘natural’ way
• Allows OpenSplice to fault-tolerantly replicate enterprise information persisted in multiple relational databases in real-time
• Provides a pure ODBC/JDBC SQL interface towards real-time information via its transparent DBMS-connection
• Overcomes the lack of communication-control (QoS features controlling real-time behavior) of ‘talking’ to a remote DBMS
• Overcomes the lack of traditional 3GL and 4GL tools and features in processing information directly from a DDS backbone
• Allows for data-logging and analysis of real-time data persisted in a DBMS
• Aligns multiple and dispersed heterogeneous databases within a distributed system using the QoS-enabled data-distribution features of OpenSplice.

OpenSplice DBMSConnect is unique in its dynamic configurability to achieve maximum performance:

• Dynamic DDS Partition/Topic selection and configurable content-filters to exchange exactly ‘the right’ information critical for performance and resource-challenged users
• Dynamic creation and mapping of DBMS database-tables and DDS topics to allow seamless data-exchange, even with legacy data models
• Selectable update-triggering per table/topic allowing for both real-time responsiveness as well as high-volume ‘batch transfers’
• Works with ANY 3rd party DBMS system with an ODBC interface

OpenSplice DBMSConnect thus effectively eliminates traditional ‘barriers’ of the standalone technologies by facilitating seamless data-exchange between any ODBC compliant (SQL)database and the OpenSplice™ real-time DDS “information-backbone”. Applications in traditionally separated mission-system domains can now exploit and leverage each other’s information in a highly efficient (based upon ‘current interest’ as supported by the publish/subscribe paradigm of DDS), non-disruptive (obeying the QoS demands as expressed for data-items in DDS) and distributed service-oriented paradigm.