Successful business integration projects depend on the blending of specialized development roles, programming techniques, and tool suites.
Business integration projects require a few basic ingredients:
The following sections elaborate on each of these ingredients.
As we discussed, the key aspects of a business integration project include the ability to coordinate the invocation of several components and the ability to handle the data exchange among those. In particular, different components can use different techniques to represent business items such as the data in an order, a customer’s information, and so on. For example, you might have to integrate a Java™ application that uses entity Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) to represent business items and an existing application that organizes information in COBOL copybooks. Therefore, a platform that aims to simplify the creation of integration solutions should also provide a generic way to represent business items, irrespective of the techniques used by the back-end systems for data handling. This goal is achieved in WebSphere® Process Server and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus thanks to the business object framework.
The business object framework enables developers to use XML Schemas to define the structure of business data and access and manipulate instances of these data structures (business objects) via XPath or Java code. The business object framework is based on the Service Data Object (SDO) standard.
The SCA programming model represents the foundation for any solution to be developed on WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. SCA provides a way for developers to encapsulate service implementations in reusable components. It enables you to define interfaces, implementations, and references in a technology-agnostic way, giving you the opportunity to bind the elements to whichever technology you choose. There is also an SCA client programming model that enables the invocation of those components. In particular, it enables runtime infrastructures based on Java to interact with non-Java runtimes. SCA uses business objects as the data items for service invocation.
IBM® WebSphere Integration Developer is the integrated development environment that has all the necessary tools to create and compose business integration solutions based on the technologies just mentioned. These solutions typically are deployed to the WebSphere Process Server or, in some cases, to the WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus.