The Freak Parade

Similar to BizTalk services, minus the workflow/identity piece but plus a fairly robust security model and web based management dashboard, Linxter(http://www.linxter.com) provides a secure, queued transport for .NET applications. Essentially the service acts as a hosted messaging queue with an extremely simple (in a good way) API and an interesting ability to optionally send file attachments with your messages, which right off the bat gives it an edge over MSMQ over HTTP in my mind. Applications using this API will request registration with a central account on startup and security settings determine if the connection is automatically granted or if an administrator has to manually grant access to your bus to the endpoint. Once access is granted, endpoints (via the Linxter SDK) can send messages and receive messages in either an “on-demand” pull model or an event based push model. The service also supports broadcasting messages to multiple endpoints.

This isn’t something that could act as an ESB, but it could certainly act as a transport for an ESB. The service doesn’t have any pricing announced and the user agreement forbids production or commercial use, but it is something to watch if such a service would be useful to you.

In our case it would be perfect for connecting client systems to our hosted solutions without having to deal with ensuring MSMQ w/HTTP support is properly installed on each endpoint machine, and ensuring the proper queues are set up, etc. Much easier deployment and maintenance for remote nodes not in our firewall. If all your endpoints are inside your firewall, a hosted queuing service may be of little value, but if you have endpoints in the wooly wild, a service like this could be invaluable, taking care of endpoint authorization, identification, and all the rest.

Here is a link to the current stage of development, which appears to be nearing the end of Beta 2