Table of Contents
This chapter explains the architectural integration concepts underpinning the Ikasan Enterprise Integration Platform approach and how these translate directly to Ikasan design concepts.
True integration is about encompassing applications into wider scoped business flows as participants operating within their area of expertise. Referring back to the separation of concerns in the Architecture Strategies chapter we can see there are clearly defined integration layers each of which need to be addressed to achieve any desired solution.
This section demonstrates these conceptual layers through the example of two applications exchanging data in a business flow. In fig.1, below, vendor X has trade confirmations (X's area of expertise) which need to go to vendor Y for reporting and matching (Y's area of expertise). Getting these applications to connect and exchange data directly is a possible solution, but not a very good. Direct (point to point) integration like this results in brittle solutions - a change in either vendor will have a direct impact on the other; and provides no opportunity to re-use should another application be introduced into the flow.
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If we take this same example and start introducing the integration layers we start to see a very different picture.
System integration is about addressing the protocol requirements for accessing the data. In many cases this is about implementing a vendor specific API or accessing data through a more public protocol such as FTP or RDBMS (for database access).
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Data integration focuses on the data constructs provided from or presented to the application via the System Integration layer Whatever form these data constructs take this layer is about resolving the data construct syntax (format of the data) and semantics (meaning of the data).
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Event integration focuses on higher level data manipulation as cleaned business events. At this level these data events are manipulated to implement basic business rules on known events. This can include routing, filtering, aggregation, splitting, etc.
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This layer is about presenting the polished business event through a well defined known service end point with which other systems can interact to receive and send business events.
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