Systems Integration and Web Services

In today’s business environment every functionality or process is starting to be affected by every other one. Businesses toady are integrating applications, data, and standards. They are supporting multiple platforms—PDAs, wireless devices, laptops. They are worrying about storage and multiple accesses to storage. All of this activity is about getting people, devices, processes and applications to interact, to talk with each other.

Businesses are also not buying new equipment and applications because budgets are limited. What they are trying to do is use the old equipment and systems, and link them together, and get it all to talk to each other.

Application integration, for all but the smallest and most simplistic businesses, is difficult and complex, typically requiring very deep requirements gathering and a group of complex technologies applied in specific ways to create the proper solution.

Requirements need to be studied to understand the common integration patterns or approaches that are applicable. These patterns can be classified into basic categories: information-oriented, service-oriented, and process integration-oriented, as well as hybrids leveraging two or more approaches, which is highly likely.

Information-oriented integration is required for those applications that need only replicate information between two or more systems. This is less complex than the other forms of integration since merely information is getting extracted out of a source system (application interface or database), and then getting transformed, and being sent to the target system.

Service-oriented integration is required for those systems that need to share both application services and information. This approach provides the infrastructure that allows applications to leverage behaviour through service access from other applications, creating a composite application.

Over the last four decades the practice of software development has gone through several different programming models. Each shift was made in part to deal with greater levels of software complexity and to enable architects to assemble applications through parts, components or services. Now Web services have removed another barrier by allowing applications to interconnect in an object-model-neutral way. The invoking application doesn’t have to know where the transaction will run, what language it is written in or what route the message may take along the way. A service is requested, and an answer is provided.

Damsk has experience in

• Ground up development solutions based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Integration of heterogeneous applications, systems and data sources