Concepts for the business integration system

This section defines integration concepts and structures that are necessary for understanding the development process in IBM WebSphere Business Integration Server Express implementations.

Integration components

Integration components are low-level, modular artifacts that interact with each other to integrate data. Business objects, collaboration templates and collaboration objects, maps, and connectors are all integration components. They are modular in the sense that they can be created and customized (except for connectors) individually to accomplish specific purposes, and, within licensing restrictions, are potentially reusable. But although they are modular, integration components are designed and configured to work together, as an interface.

Interfaces

When you develop or select integration components, you typically think about them in the context of an interface. An interface is not a structure or artifact itself, but is a way of thinking about the integration components that will work together to automate your specific business process. For example, you might create one interface to synchronize employee records between PeopleSoft and SAP. Another interface might synchronize customer records between Siebel and SAP.

An interface typically centers around a collaboration object, which is an instance of a collaboration template, with its ports bound to the components that are appropriate for the interface.

Solutions

A solution is a collection of components that are designed to address a general business need, such as order management, or customer relationship management. A solution might consist of the integration components that make up one single interface, or it might consist of the integration components that make up multiple interfaces, each interface addressing a specific aspect of the overall business need. For example, for the general purpose of customer relationship management, there might be one interface for integrating billing data about customers, utilizing a collaboration template and business objects designed for that purpose, and another interface integrating customer credit information, utilizing a collaboration template and business objects designed for that specific purpose. Together, the integration components that make up these specific interfaces comprise an overall business solution.

Integration component libraries

Integration component libraries are structural groupings of components in your development environment. You define a library in System Manager and System Manager creates a directory in the file system that represents the library. Within the library directory is a number of subdirectories for each type of integration component. When you create an integration component, System Manager creates a file or group of files and stores them in the proper subdirectory within the directory of the library.

User projects

User projects are structures within System Manager that support the need to organize integration components together so that they are viewed as belonging to an interface. User projects are collections of shortcuts to integration components in one or more libraries, so you can create one user project for each interface. Each user project might have shortcuts to some of the same components in a library because interfaces frequently share components. A customer synchronization interface and an order processing interface that both involved the SAP application, for instance, would both require the Adapter for SAP, so the user projects that correspond to those interfaces would both have shortcuts to the definition for the SAP connector.

InterChange Server Express instances

InterChange Server Express is an integration broker. It is the software infrastructure that provides business process integration and automation. When you install InterChange Server Express on a computer and start the server, you start a server instance. A server instance hosts the business integration system that is comprised of all the interfaces that satisfy the integration requirements of the customer. Typically you will have one instance of InterChange Server Express dedicated to developing and testing the business integration system as a whole, and one instance for hosting the production release of the system.

Copyright IBM Corp. 2004