7.1 Selecting an integration technology

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With the continuous progress of enterprise computing, more and more enterprises are finding the need to quickly adopt new technologies and integrate with existing applications. Furthermore, due to costs and human resource limitations, it is often not feasible for enterprises to completely discard their existing infrastructure.

Enterprise application integration (EAI) and Extended Enterprise (EE) allow disparate applications to communicate with each other. Both domains are very similar; their differences are limited mainly to the required Quality of Services capabilities. Some points to consider while deciding on the integration technology between applications are as follows:

The current infrastructure: Do you already have a messaging system on the enterprise tier? Then it makes sense to go for JMS. Or, if you have a legacy system such as CICS or IMS, J2EE Connectors might be the better choice.
Time to market: Web service enabling an application is relatively fast with the Web services development tools available.
Future expansion plans: If you plan to expand your enterprise systems in the future, you need to keep in mind the integration with your current infrastructure and your planned infrastructure. Web services may provide the most cost-effective migration path in such a case.
Reliability: JMS with WebSphere MQ, for example, can be used to provide assured transfer of data, even when the enterprise application is unavailable.
Transaction support: Web services currently do not offer support for transactions. If your application needs transactional management, it might be worthwhile considering technologies that do, such as JMS or J2EE Connectors.

Currently, the available product mappings for the Integration Application and Extended Enterprise patterns focus on the use of the following technology options (Table 7-1).

Table 7-1: Technology options across the patterns
Business Drivers	Direct Connection	Exposed Direct Connection	Broker	Exposed Broker	Serial Process	Exposed Serial Process	Parallel Process
XML	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü
Web services	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü
J2EE Connector Architecture	ü	ü
Java Message Service (JMS)	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü	ü
Message-oriented Middleware			ü	ü	ü	ü	ü
Flow languages					ü	ü	ü

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