Welcome to the technical resource for the WIC EBT Middleware project(s), also known as WEM and as SWEM, respectively.
The concept of need for Middleware originated with the SPIRIT Management Information System (MIS) user group and their need for a software that could interpret the EBT interface that already exists in SPIRIT and translate that interface to work with EBT systems that subscribe to the WIC Universal MIS to EBT Interface (WUMEI) defined under the guidance of the Food and Nutrition Services Division of the USDA (FNS). The goal of the Middleware was to handle the messages and files as well as provide logging of the information that passed back and forth across the interface. As a result a workgroup assembled for a joint application development (JAD) session and defined what would become known as SWEM (SPIRIT WIC EBT Middleware).
SWEM was developed for the one-to-one communication between the MIS and EBT systems. After SWEM was introduced, another similar project emerged from a different client, where a similar product was needed for communication with the Open Domain MIS. This new project added a substantial additional requirement that it must support multiple endpoints simultaneously to transact messages from one MIS to two distinct EBT endpoints, then additionally with a dual MIS endpoints communicating to a single EBT system. This required building a new Middleware from the ground up. This product was not specific to SPIRIT and was consequently named simply WEM (WIC EBT Middleware). This product used lessons learned from the SWEM development to create a system that was adaptable, extensible, highly configurable and robust.
As attention turned to supporting Smart Card EBT in SPIRIT it became apparent that features needed did not exist in SWEM, however they did exist in WEM. So WEM was updated to include support for the SPIRIT MIS in order to enable Smart Card EBT support. The second version of WEM (2.0) included support for the functionality that was included in SWEM, then subsequently version 2.0.1 included the updates to add Smart Card support.
The following defines different sections of this document.