Enterprise Integration Concepts

Common Enterprise Integration Projects

Integration projects can be broadly classified into the following six types:

Information Portal: The web portal aggregates information from multiple sources into a single display, usually with multiple visual zones, each from a different system.
Data Replication: Since data for a particular domain (e.g., customer information) may be used by multiple systems. These systems, which have their own data store gets replicated from the master data.
Shared Business Functions: Shared business functions may be exposed by various systems, allowing any system that requires access to this data to use these business functions / services.
Services-Oriented Architecture: Useful shared business functions are exposed and a new application can use SOA architecture to orchestrate these functions to perform a higher level function. This may sometimes be also know as a “service bus architecture”.
Distributed Business Processes: A business process management system can use a number of applications to execute a distributed business function. It is quite similar to SOA.
Business to Business Integration: Corporate applications may call upon external peer business functions to query for information that is required by the application.

Publish / Subscribe: Allows a data source to publish a message to one or more consumers.
Aggregator: Receives multiple incoming messages from different systems for a particular transaction / order and combines them into another message based on the incoming message content. E.g. incoming messages from check inventory and check customer credit for the same order, which then go into an enriched resultant message.
Content-Based-Router: Consumes an incoming message and publishes it unmodified to a choice of other message channels based on the rules in the router. E.g. if incoming message’s customer credit or inventory not available are not satisfied, it can route the message / order to an channel that handles invalid order.
Message Translator: Converts a message from one format to another.
Content Enricher: Adds missing data items to an incoming message.
Message Store: Stores messages into a database.