Introduction to Application Integration

There has always been a need to integrate disparate applications. Many stovepipe applications, which cater to the need of a specific business unit such as marketing or sales, exist in the enterprise. These applications were often developed in house or were best-of-the-breed packaged solutions. In the 1990s middleware products helped glue some of these applications point-to-point, solving some problems in the short term but also introducing some critical complexities due to their nature of being one-off solutions. These solutions themselves used propriety technologies because standards did not exist. Most of these integration solutions were centered around data-conversion and message-broker technologies.

Introduction of standards such as J2EE, J2EE Connector Architecture (J2CA), and Java Messaging Service (JMS) has revolutionized application integration. WLI s Application Integration (AI) framework provides functionality centered around J2CA architecture.