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Enterprise Integration Pattern An introduction
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Introduction
Having developed, projects in various technologies, every organization is trying to couple them up and form an Integration solution. When you are integrating the application in the In house then the integration is called as the Enterprise Integration. When the integration is spanning to the various enterprise then it is called as the Business-to-Business (B2B) Integration. Technology that is growing and provides a good source of development opportunity is Enterprise integration. Different world known software Organization provide different platform to do the Integration. Web Sphere from IBM, BizTalk from the Microsoft is the example for the Enterprise integration platform. This article doesn’t relate to any of the above mentioned platform. It just provides the technical guidelines, how to design and implement the EAI.
Before getting in more design aspect, we first consider the things that are critical aspect to the Application Integration.
On each integration, we are not going to adopt the same style. It differs from the technology to technology involved.
Factors affecting Integrations
Application Coupling, Data format and functionality, Integration simplicity and technology, Asynchronicity.
Application coupling:
Coupling indicates the dependencies of application on each other in the system .if the coupling is strong, application depends on each other such that even small changes in one will definitely will affect other application and system many go unfunctional in the worst case. So we have to design the system such that each application can change to some extent with out affecting the other.
Integration simplicity:
Amount of code that needed to integrate Application should be less. Making the change in the integration for the less concerned things will not fetch much affect. So make the coding standard in the integration.
Integration technology:
Since different technology applications are integrated, needed good expert and diagnostic expert to sort of the problem soon, or else it locks the working of the various applications.
Data Formats:
Data formats differ from one application to the other. So we need an universal and unified translator which would take care of translation. We need to update the translator with the need reforms and format change between the applications.
Data Availability:
Since many application are working collaboratively, way the share the data’s are very important. We have to take care of the message size and traffic involved. Longer the chunks of data slower the processing and decline in the working process. If Applications are sharing through the network then network traffic should be taken much consideration. As sooner the data’s are arrived application that needs this data for processing should be informed.
Asynchronicity
If the applications are in the standalone then there is no chance in considering the asynchronous. Since they are interconnected and integrated, synchronization is difficult. Processing in these kind of applications need message to arrive from various means. So the message arrival cannot be confirmed all the time. Even in some system invoke other’s procedure. So always it is advisable to have some background processing and make the application to respond to other activities.
Having learnt the criteria that have to be considered in designing the Integration system we are looking in to the patterns that are available for the Enterprise Application Integration.
Integration Styles
File Transfer
Well known that integrated application, do differ in their data format. Some files may be text files with different formats others may be from legacy system and some other in different format. Translator takes care of translation and does the need.
Since now everybody is relying XML message format we can have central translator which converts the incoming format in to XML format as desired by the receiving application. This is main framework done in BizTalk.
Remote Procedure Invocation
Remote method invocation calls other application running remotely using remote procedure calls. When one application needs to communicate it calls the method and send the message to application at the other end. Any sort of communication is done like this only. Each application maintains it’s integrity well.
Messaging
Messaging in the integration architecture should be asynchronous as we cannot guarantee the when the information will be available. Since application does not wait for the message we have a low adhesion and high cohesion.
Shared Database
Here every application shares the central database. Then query the database to get the desired information. If simultaneous access updating occurs transaction management takes care of that, so data is always consistent.
Summary
Using the Patterns, we can design the efficient Integration system. We can use these as guidelines and extract true benefit out of Enterprise integration system.
I, hope this article brings you just the introduction about what Integration Patterns are. In, the next article we see more about Messaging patterns and more.
Keep an eye to get some good things………………
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