Organization

This book follows a clear structure that will make your reading experience more valuable.

There are four parts:

• Part I: Types of Application Integration

• Part II: Application Integration Technology

• Part III: Application Integration Standards

• Part IV: Advanced Topics

In Part I I focus on the types of application integration approaches you'll find in your problem domain in other words, general approaches to sharing information, processes, and application services between any number of applications. It's important that you read this section because it sets up concepts for the rest of the book. Also, if you've read my previous books you'll see how my thinking is morphing after building and implementing a lot of application integration technology.

In Part II I talk about application integration technology including middleware, and specifically application integration middleware such as integration servers and application servers. Once again, I will discuss the technology in terms of their uses within the world of application integration. Even if you're a middleware god, you might want to read this section anyway, as it will be a good review.

In Part III I talk about application integration standards. If you've been in this world at all you'll know that standards are the way people are looking to approach this problem, rather than vendor solutions. In this section I'll talk about these issues, as well as describe the standards that are relevant to application integration.

In Part IV I talk about how you need to approach your own application integration problem domain, including procedures, methodologies, and techniques that you can employ to improve your chance of success. Moreover, I'll address advanced application integration topics, including the advent of vertically oriented application integration technology as well as the advanced use of metadata.