FuseSource Open Source Integration Tracks Real-Time Shipments at Lynden

Freight and logistics company Lynden Inc. is using FuseSource Corp.’s Fuse Message Broker to track freight shipments in real time and communicate the information to its warehouses and customers.

by Vance McCarthy

Tags: ActiveMQ, Apache, FuseSource, integration, message broker, middleware, Java,

lynden_tracking Freight and logistics company Lynden Inc. is using FuseSource Corp.’s Fuse Message Broker to track freight shipments in real time and communicate the information to its warehouses and customers.

Lynden officials turned to FuseSource’s open source-based integration technology to solve two issues: a way for mobile devices to communicate with its tracking system, and a way to provide customers real-time notifications of the status of their freight shipments, according to Lynden’s senior software engineer Rob Terpilowski.

Fuse Message Broker provided Lynden a reliable and affordable messaging solution that can scale as the quantity of freight Lynden processes and delivers increases, he said.

“Having a dependable system for tracking each and every piece of freight that we ship is absolutely critical for our business,” Terpilowski said in a statement. Customers also need accurate and real-time status updates on such shipments, he added.

Fuse Message Broker is an open source enterprise-class distribution of the Apache Software Foundation’s (ASF) ActiveMQ messaging platform, and is productized and supported by the people who wrote the code, according to FuseSource CTO Rob Davies, who is also a co-founder of and committer to the ActiveMQ and other ASF integration projects.

“Our distributions of [ASF] integration and messaging projects enable companies like Lynden to access . . . the information they need to best serve their customers and respond to the growing demand for data in real-time without replacing entire IT systems,” Davies said in a statement.

Fuse Message Broker is the JMS platform of choice for scalable, high-performance SOA infrastructure to connect processes across heterogeneous systems. It is designed to be scalable to deliver large amounts of data efficiently and reliably. In addition, Fuse Message Broker offerings clustering and failover features to ensure high availability.

Fuse Message Broker supports JMS 1.1, as well as many popular integration-related standards (JDBC, JCA, J2EE and REST). It also supports HTTP, pub-sub and P2P messaging for multi-point broadcasting and/or discreet or unique messaging. Fuse Message Broker also supports a range of custom and third-party solutions for authentication and authorization.

At Lynden, Fuse Message Broker provides a reliable way for its systems to talk to each other as well as pull the data its customers need to track their shipments every step of the way, according to Terpilowski. The solution also was low cost, highly reliable and flexible to the point it provided Lynden the client software it needed to run within the company’s existing C# applications.

As to implementation, Lynden integrated Fuse Message Broker with its current UniVerse DB applications, as well as a range of Java, web and Windows apps and hand-held Windows CE devices. This broad range of client support allows Lynden’s warehouse staff to monitor and track when and where individual shipments are delivered or processed – and notify customers, Terpilowski said.

At present, Lynden uses Fuse Message Broker to scan and track some 70,000 pieces of freight daily, according to Terpilowski. That will increase to 300,000 pieces daily when Lynden ties in its solution with Lynden International and other units, he added.