Message Translator

A MessageTranslator is a specialized kind of MessageRouter that takes a message in one format and translates it to another format. There are a number of commercial products that do that, like Extricity.

A common pattern we see today is that a group of programs decide on a common XML message format (a CanonicalMessageDataFormat), and then use a MessageTranslator to interface with other programs that do not natively speak that XML format.