Portal Power

The use of portals to integrate enterprises has many advantages. The primary one is that there is no need to integrate back-end systems directly between companies or within enterprises, which eliminates the associated cost or risk. What's more, you usually don't have to worry about circumventing firewalls or application-to-application security, because portals typically do nothing more than Web-enable existing systems from a single enterprise. With portals, you simply connect to each back-end system through a point of integration (user interface, database, application server, etc.) and externalize the information into a common user interface (Web browser). Of course, portals themselves are applications and must be designed, built, and tested like any other enterprise application.

POAI also provides a good facility for Web-enabling existing enterprise systems for any purpose, including B2B and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) selling over the Web. If you need to move information to a user interface for any reason, this is the best approach.

In many application integration problem domains, the users prefer to interact with the back-end systems through a user interface rather than have the systems automatically exchange information behind the scenes (as in data-oriented application integration). Today, more B2B information flows through user interfaces (POAI) than automatically through back-end integration. However, the trend is moving from portals to real-time information exchange, which is the topic of this book. We will eventually remove the end user who is the most obvious point of latency when considering POAI from the equation.

The advantages of POAI are clear.

  • It supports a true noninvasive approach, allowing other organizations to interact with a company's internal systems through a controlled interface accessible over the Web.

  • It is typically much faster to implement than real-time information exchange with back-end systems, such as the data-, service-, and application interface-oriented approaches.

  • Its enabling technology is mature, and you can learn from many examples of POAI that exist.

However, there are also disadvantages to portal-level application integration.

  • Information does not flow in real time and so requires human interaction. As a result, systems do not automatically react to business events within an enterprise (such as the depletion of inventory).

  • Information must be abstracted, most typically, through another application logic layer (e.g., an application server). As a result, some portal-oriented solutions actually add complexity to the solution.

  • Security is a significant concern when enterprise data is being extended to users over the Web.



Next Generation Application Integration(c) From Simple Information to Web Services
Next Generation Application Integration: From Simple Information to Web Services
ISBN: 0201844567
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 220

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