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Enterprise Integration Strategies
EAI vs. EJBs vs. SOA Web Services

Briefing Overview

This one-day briefing examines the current and near-future states of business integration technologies and methodologies.   By matching business requirements with architecture options, it provides guidance to IT planners and decision-makers who are evaluating, re-evaluating and deciding application integration strategies and tactics.

As the briefing examines each integration strategy, it explains key solution attributes and the implications of each application integration approach:

  • Flow: Synchronous vs. Asynchronous

  • Linkage: RPC API vs. Messaging

  • Coupling: Tightly-coupled vs. Loosely-coupled

  • Granularity: Fine vs. Coarsely Grained Components

  • Orchestration Need and Responsibility

  • Component Reusability

  • Integration Focus: Data vs. Business Process

 Briefing Agenda

Section 1: Business Issues that Drive Integration Strategies

The key business differentiators that have led to the current integration approaches-Batch Interfaces, EAI, EJBs and SOA Web Services-with special emphasis on data “currency” requirements.  Graphical business models illustrate the requirements and impacts of:

  • The nature of the underlying business relationships

  • Business interaction volume, frequency and value

  • Transaction duration

  • IT sophistication required by each approach 

This section pays particular attention to the differing integration needs and solutions dictated by Enterprise and Distributed Business Relationships.  It shows how many former data interfaces have evolved into full-blown near-real-time distributed transaction relationships.

Section 2: Classic and Current Data Integration Approaches

Data interface approaches and techniques used to integrate uncoupled processes:

  • Data Connectors & Adaptors

  • EDI

  • XSLT (XML Transformation)

Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) challenges, focusing on the key data definition and metadata issues:

  • Logical data definition

  • Physical format

  • Semantic integrity

Section 3: Classic and Current Process Integration Approaches

Process interface approaches and techniques used to integrate tightly coupled processes:

  • EAI Direct Transaction Interfaces

  • 3-Tiered to n-Tiered Approaches

  • Middleware & Asynchronous Integration

  • The Brokered Solution

  • The J2EE/EJB Solution

Discussion centers on the evolution of local real-time synchronous interfaces to distributed near-real-time asynchronous integration solutions based on message-oriented middleware.  The briefing explores the difficulties and complexities of building a managed architecture using application servers and integration servers to ensure transaction and data integrity between business partners and across disparate platforms.

Section 4: Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)

The latest business integration initiatives and the emergence of a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach implemented via:

  • Loosely-coupled Web Services

  • Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

This section provides an overview of SOAP and WSDL, focusing on their value as an integration strategy and how to use them to build “wrapper” solutions.

The evolving need for orchestration and choreography:

  • The growing importance of business process definition and modeling as business partners evolve from data and transaction integration to business alignment and process orchestration

  • The evolution of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) as well-accepted standards for defining, expressing and building orchestrated processes and Web Services

  • The ongoing race to create additional standards and best practices that enable heterogeneous business processes to interoperate smoothly in a SOA