Agile Software Development is one of the most profound information technology innovations of the last decade. Agile methods have been implemented successfully on countless application development projects but the software integrators seem somewhat skeptical. Comments I frequently heard include ‘But integration is different …’, ‘SOA is more architectural..’, or ‘We need […]
This article takes outlines construction of a service in the service-oriented integration (SOI).
Components of a service
Diagram below illustrates functional components of a service. At this moment we don’ allocate these functions to the specific components of the integration stack.
The service interface is a collection of message types […]
This article takes a critical look at the value across an integration stack. The value is distributed very unevenly. Most of the stack components deliver unquestionable value. However, the core of the integration stack - the integration brokers - tend to provide very primitive development environments. While these development environments allow […]
Asynchronous, reliable message passing is one of the cornerstones of an integration infrastructure. Traditionally, asynchronous reliable transport has been provided by message-oriented middleware. Many EAI vendors started as MOM vendors. Simply put, it is difficult to imagine an EAI solution without MOM.
However, before you go and buy yourself MQ Series, TIBCO, or one of their […]
How do you apply SOA ideas in the EAI world? the following is an outline of Service-oriented Integration architecture: an EAI based on SOA concepts. In order to marry the two, we’ll borrow some SOA concepts, we’ll reject some of them and finally we’ll add a few extensions […]
Last month I was raving about BizTalks Message Boxes. Last week I got somewhat disappointed: BizTalk does not support the basic store-end-forward message exchange pattern.
What am I trying to do?
I am trying to publish a message (store-and-forward message) to Message Box and have another orchestration - which may not […]
My last post suggested that the integration tools tend to offer poor development support. This article takes a look at IBM’s Interchange version 4.3 (ICS 4.3), a popular EAI tool, and analyses it’ development toolset.
The Good Stuff: Broker Infrastructure
As Value across the integration stack suggests, generally the infrastructure part […]
You may not be aware of it, but when you’ve built your integration solution, you’ve made a choice between a broker model and a bus model. Or you mixed the two.
This article looks at both models and identifies the repercussions of this choice.
Why do I even care: the one-sentence intro to EAI
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This paper briefly compares Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) suites from two leading vendors: IBM and TIBCO. This comparison leads to an observation that the products in the EAI space converge; the products on the lower levels become commoditized while the innovation concentrates on the higher stack levels. Similarities extend beyond the […]
Integrating applications may have multiple and differing objectives. For instance, you may want to synchronize the data between disparate applications or provide the user community with a single view of multiple legacy systems that your organization collected over the years. Or you would like to do both.
Experience shows […]