Introduction


There are as many reasons why systems need to integrate as there are methods for doing so. One thing is clearfor a competitive edge, businesses need to integrate internally as well as allow customers to integrate externally to their core business processes. It's a clear trend that companies that can leverage and coordinate their internal business processes to a single platform from a diverse chaotic one can gain a competitive edge. Systems tend to grow exponentially and are governed by factors such as mergers and acquisitions, diverse internal development groups, system purchases, and others. The typical application landscape in an enterprise is an unfocused one. Couple this with the increasing demand for customers to integrate business processes and the ensuing opportunity that this brings, and the need for easy integration is clear.

Consider Amazon.com, a company that has expanded its core database and sales engine to an affiliate network, allowing an extensive network of smaller sites to sell focused sets of products from the main Amazon.com sitewith Amazon realizing the transactions. This benefits a new community of affiliated process consumers in widening the parent companies' market shares, boosting business for both, and increasing customer satisfactionas customers' legwork, that is, fishing through the extensive product lines, is done for them by the affiliate.

The need for integration also operates within the enterprise. Consider another case where a large enterprise has, through acquisition, purchased several smaller companies, each with different processes for managing stock and inventory. For the overall enterprise to be successful, these inventories need to be physically and logically integrated onto a single system. A patchwork of glued code could be put together, having a single master application talk to the other applications on the user's behalf, but this is a poor substitute for a true, integrated process.

It is because of cases such as these that integration technologies have grown. Subsequent chapters of this book delve into these technologies and help provide understanding as well as an appreciation for how they can empower a company to maximize its assets and potentially open new areas for business.

There are two methodologies for integration that need to be explored, each with their relative advantages, but each carrying unique costs of their own.

The first, synchronous integration, is the focus of the next three chapters. This form of integration is when the systems enter a locking communication state for the life of the transaction on which they are integrating. A classic example of a synchronous integration occurs every time you visit a Web pagein this case your Web browser is effectively integrating your machine with the server for the purpose of retrieving information on-demand. The browser connects to the server, requests the page, and downloads the page, rendering it for view. It cannot do anything else while it is in this processnor would you want it to.

The second, asynchronous integration, is the focus of Chapters 7 through 10. In this case, the systems do not enter a locking state when they are working on their transaction. One process calls the other and then goes off and does whatever it needs to do while the transaction is running. When it is ready, the callee calls it back and updates it with the results.




Java EE and. Net Interoperability(c) Integration Strategies, Patterns, and Best Practices
Java EE and .NET Interoperability: Integration Strategies, Patterns, and Best Practices
ISBN: 0131472232
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 170

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