The Solution Studio provides a common build environment for applications and solutions. The artifacts that make up the Product Information Management for Retailers solution within the Industry Libraries layer consist of collaboration templates, IBM WebSphere application adapters, message sets, and business objects. The collaboration templates are built on Runtime Solutions layer components, including the integration hub, in any particular solution deployment. In this architecture, the ICI layer (contained within Common Solution and Integration Services) provides the connection between the business process definitions, located within the Runtime Solutions layer, and the WebSphere platform and existing infrastructure, which hold the business functions operating on legacy systems.
ICI executes the state transitions, required by Process Integration (contained within the Runtime Solutions layer) to traverse the business processes that drive the integration architecture, in a way that allows these business processes to be reused. The primary goal of ICI is to provide loose coupling of the business functions to the business process so that either or both can be independently enhanced over time.
To achieve this goal, ICI must provide message routing and transformation services against a granular set of messages in the particular message model utilized between PI and ICI. This approach ensures that the interactions that leverage the coupling of the functions and the navigation are a normalized implementation of the message vocabulary, and as such, are independent of the systems providing the functions. By taking this approach, systems can be integrated without needing to be continually adjusted as other aspects of the topology are changed. This approach also simplifies the architecture because it positions all process choreography within the PI layer, so that it reflects all aspects of the business process.
Process integration requirements involving only automated processing are addressed using IBM integration technology in the form of layered collaboration templates, which are discussed in detail in the section Collaboration templates.
Parent topic: Architecture