A better solution than the "best"...For every interapplication integration challenge, there are many commercially available solutions. But no one solution will work on every platform. Not surprisingly, the traditional tendency is to employ the “best of breed” solution for each interface. That very variety of options can work against long-term maintenance, however, because any given “best of breed” interface is often necessarily unique. Every time you need a new interface to another remote application, you have to add a new one-to-one interface. The number of interfaces increases geometrically with each pair of applications that must exchange data. Each application added to the system increases the integration effort, requiring new development, redevelopment and re-coding of each interface's application, testing, and repair issues. We have found that a more effective approach is to define a “lowest common denominator” interface to a transport layer. Then, integration is simply a matter of providing each application with just the one needed interface to the transport. This “lowest common denominator” in this case is a uniform data structure provided by XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Using “best of breed” integration, there are as many adapters as there are interfaces. With Bizevex adding the common, XML-based, transport layer, there is only one adapter required for each application. Each additional application requires only an adapter that understands the common XML vocabulary, regardless, of the actual transport protocol—whether it is MQSeries, FTP, or a custom protocol. How the message arrives is inconsequential to the adapter. That is the key to the Bizevex solution: focusing the effort of integration, not on the middleware, but on the information itself. |
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