Standards in Application Integration

The new-generation Application Integration solutions, like BEA WebLogic Integration, take a standards-based approach. This approach is fast to implement and easier to manage. It helps enterprises that develop solutions in house, System Integrators, and Enterprise Information Service vendors . Enterprise computing in general has embraced the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard.

The use of standards guarantees interoperability for enterprise technologies. Standards such as the Java Messaging Service (JMS) ”which provides the standard API to message transport systems ”and the J2EE Connector Architecture (J2CA) standard ”which helps connect to heterogeneous enterprise systems such as ERP, CRM, mainframe-based systems, and database systems ”are making Application Integration a great deal easier. For example, a CRM vendor can easily provide a resource adapter so that its product can plug in any solution that supports J2EE Connector Architecture. Application Integration providers are creating resource adapters for legacy systems like mainframes on which many mission-critical applications still run. Solutions that adhere to such transport standards as HTTP, SMTP, HTML, and SOAP make it much easier to integrate.

The J2CA standard provides a single access interface to enterprise applications analogous to JDBC, providing standardized access to various relational databases.

There is still a long way to go as far as standards are concerned . Standards like SOAP currently do not cover security and transaction aspects. However, at the same time, companies are promoting initiatives such as Transaction Authority Markup Language (XAML) to enable Web services with transactional properties. Similarly, the BizTalk standard has provided SOAP extensions for security and guaranteed message delivery.