Using Solace’s Support for REST to Integrate into TradeX for Data Tracing

TradeX, an independent cloud native software vendor enabling data tracing via encryption and a centralized immutable ledger, has developed an easy integration for ledgering events data for any use case using Solace’s first-class support for the REST protocol.

This integration subscribes to TradeX’s REST API to event streams produced by any application or device connected to Solace without any external processes, listeners, or client libraries. The benefits of this integration approach is that implementation does not require any code changes. All it requires is a deployment and configuration change to immediately gain access to immutable ledgering and reporting capability.

Solace PubSub+ Event Broker has built-in support for a variety of proprietary and open standard protocols and APIs, so you can create and connect apps with whatever language, open protocols and APIs you choose, without worrying about translation.

The applications or devices producing the events do not need to know their events are ledgered because they are not interacting with TradeX’s API directly—Solace is delivering the events the producing applications produce to any interested downstream applications as well as TradeX’s API. This enables TradeX to “wiretap” relevant event streams and to build reports for a variety of compliance, regulatory, or forensic scenarios.

The implication for this design is that the RDP TradeX implementation has to subscribe to queues and topics the customer needs ledgered. Due to this design, there will be more traffic flowing over the queue which can be overcome by deploying additional event brokers.

TradeX API for data tracing and reporting

TradeX allows users and clients to interact with the TradeX API to ledger transactions as well as reports on usage. TradeX shows transaction confirmations using their Reporting API.

REST API Ledger Endpoints:

POST /v1/transactions

• Usage:Used to create and store transaction logs
• Required Role:user
• Notes:object and objectType are optional
• Body:

{
  actor: "user1",
  actorType: "user",
  target: "user2",
  targetType: "user",
  object: "file1",
  objectType: "file",
  type: string,
}

Query from the ledger
GET /v1/reports

• Usage:Used to query a general report on actor, target, object, type, or a combination of the four
• Required Role:user
• Notes:All properties are optional (actor, target, object, type)
• Body:

{
  actor: "user1",
  target: "user2",
  type: "sent",
}

Integration between Solace PubSub+ Event Broker and TradeX using a REST Delivery Point (RDP)

A REST Delivery Point (RDP) is a Solace configuration object that links the message queues that attract messages and REST consumer applications that take delivery of those messages.

These are the steps to establish an integration between Solace PubSub+ Event Broker and TradeX:

• A REST Delivery Point is configured with bindings to persistent message queues which attract any messages that are intended to be ledgered by TradeX
• The REST Delivery Point schedules newly-arriving messages for delivery over REST to TradeX’s transactions endpoint
• Messages are delivered to TradeX’s transaction endpoint and they are ledgered in the order they were received by the broker

This integration pattern offloads the responsibility of ledgering data from individual microservices to the event broker—offering low-touch data tracing for any applications participating in your event mesh.

If ledgering a consumer application’s receipt of receiving a message is required, the consumer application can wrap its onReceive logic in a transaction so that it will only send back message acknowledgements to the Solace broker after it publishes a message acknowledging the receipt of a message. This transaction ensures that messages will not be removed from the consumer application’s queue until its receipt of receiving the messages from its queue is sent to the broker and thus ledgered by TradeX.

See the diagram below for an example end-to-end flow that involves consumer application transactions:

You can learn more about how Solace PubSub+ Event Broker allows REST applications to participate in an event mesh.

What is data tracing and why is immutability important?

Data tracing allows companies to understand and confirm exactly where data is being used to support audit, security, analytics, or sales efforts. Tracing can confirm, prioritize, or self-select important data at higher volumes. As the data landscape grows, there is increased pressure to be able to independently confirm what data exists, where, and how it is used.

There is also a growing need to ensure source data and metadata cannot be manipulated. TradeX Ledger is an immutable product with verifiable proof that the information ledgered is valid and a source of truth. The use cases range across all industries, from order execution data in financial services, to crash data in manufacturing, to specific wagers in gambling environments.

Why is this different than blockchain or traditional databases?

A blockchain can be either built on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) or Centralized but provides a source of secure transactions that cannot be modified in either case. TradeX Ledger is designed with the Centralized model, providing the same level of verification without the burden, latency, or cost of a decentralized multilayer node system.

Using the TradeX Ledger product, firms can indisputably verify each transaction independently. The trust is in TradeX’s ability to Merkle proof each transaction, which is a way to efficiently prove the validity of data without storing the whole data set sing hash trees.

Databases are fungible and do not provide immutability. TradeX can immutably verify transactions without the latency or complexity of most DLT applications. The TradeX ledger runs at several orders of magnitudes faster than DLT on both read and write without the need to build an extraction layer, network overhead or the need to hire blockchain expertise to manage a variety of integration layers.

Conclusion

Solace’s first-class support for the RESTful protocol allows for seamless integration into a variety of endpoints. It also provides a native and powerful solution to integrate your eventing world with the RESTful world. The TradeX ledgering solution provides a way to integrate into Solace PubSub+ Event Broker to report and proof key transactions or event streams.

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