Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents

Overview

This document is one of a suite of documents describing the Ikasan Enterprise Integration Platform, an open source integration platform for robust and adaptable integration solutions.

Overview

The Ikasan Enterprise Integration Platform (EIP) addresses the problem domain most commonly known as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). Enterprise application integration can be, and already has been, approached a number of different ways by a number of projects/vendors, both Open Source and closed commercial frameworks. It is the intention of the Ikasan Enterprise Integration Platform to address this domain as commoditised configurable solutions rather than another development framework.

This document describes the central premise defining Ikasan; the guiding strategies which have influenced Ikasan's design; and the architectural concepts which shape the integration solution approaches.

Ikasan was originally born out of addressing integration issues within Financial Services where guaranteed once-only data delivery is paramount. The central premise for Ikasan can simply be defined as “the provision of robust and adaptable integration solutions which expose the business artefacts, whilst fencing-in the application's specifics”. The intention here is for Ikasan to take care of the peripheral issues of integration, such as communication and data transformation, and allow the presentation of business entities through common constructs and services thus allowing the user to focus on the core issue of business data orchestration.

Where possible every effort has been made to ensure this document remains free from technical detail thus keeping it open to as wide as an audience as possible.