Burnham's Beat: DIM: Hijacking IM for Data Transport

Burnham's Beat: DIM: Hijacking IM for Data Transport


Why send data over IM? One reason is that IM infrastructures have solved a lot of tough technical problems such as firewall traversal, multi-protocol transformation, and real-time presence management. Sending messages over these networks allows applications to leverage the investments made to solve these tough problems. Another reason is that many companies already have IM “friendly” infrastructures which means that all the necessary firewall ports are open, the clients are already certified and installed, and operations infrastructure like logging, back-up, and even high-availability are already in place. Thus by using IM for computer-to-computer communication, developers are able to “hijack” all the valuable investment made in IM and use it for a purpose that its creators likely never intended.

Of course, DIM-based communications have many of the same drawbacks that human-to-human IM has. Because IM is a real-time “fire and forget” system, DIM lacks many of the hard-core transaction capabilities that most Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solutions incorporate. Thus you wouldn’t want to rely on DIM for mission critical transactions management. In fact, a full blown EAI system with a rich work flow capability, rules-based message management and semantic mapping capabilities is more capable and reliable than DIM for just about everything.