What This Book Is

What This Book Is; What This Book Is Not

At its essence this is an information technology strategy book with some detailed technology discussion just enough technology content to support the notions put forth. This book takes an important topic, application integration, to the next level by suggesting certain ways to view the problem that may not have been understood in the past.

This means I'll focus on higher-level approaches and solutions, rather than spend a lot of time describing the technologies. There are plenty of other books that do that. For example, I talk about the Java Message System (JMS) in terms of the general ideas behind this important standard; you can obtain more details about its use in an application integration solution set by reading the 200-page standard found at www.javasoft.com, or other books specifically on JMS. The same can be said about .NET, J2EE, ebXML, and other technologies I'll discuss in this book.

Indeed, I will cover the enabling technologies by focusing on their value in solving the application integration problem. For most of you, further research into these technologies or standards won't be required; there will be enough information here. However, those of you looking for implementation-level details will have to take a deeper dive using further research outside the scope of this book.