High Level Architecture (HLA) is a communication standard used during a computer simulation by software applications to communicate with one another. The HLA communication standards and initial infrastructure were developed by the United States Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO). As the standards matured, DMSO turned over infrastructure development to industry. In a war game simulation HLA may be used to manage the flow of data between the various hardware and software component that may be used to simulate various real-world counterparts (e.g., troops, vehicles, ships, etc.) during the war game. This may allow, for example, a tank to be simulated separately from a jeep, while still allowing the tank and jeep simulations to interact with one another.
An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) may allow ESB clients to communicate with one another. The ESB clients may communicate via extensible Markup Language (XML). XML provides a way for structured data to be shared across different information systems, such as different ESB clients. Schemas may be used to define what an XML document should look like. XML messages may have a different format than HLA messages. One messaging service that may be used to transport XML documents is Java Messaging Service (JMS). JMS is commonly used to facilitate communication between Java implemented applications.
Traditionally, communication between an XML or JMS component and an HLA component required the use of a bridge to translate between the two services. Unfortunately, whenever a new type of message needed to be translated, new Java code had to be created. The Java code provided instructions on how the bridge was to map the fields of one message type to the other.