A Tecnology Proposal to Realise Enterprise Application Integration

Abstract

All over the years, enterprises have been accumulating a variety of applications in their software ecosystem to support their business processes. As a result, a software ecosystem is an heterogeneous set of IT assets (data and functionality) of the enterprise. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) discipline aims to provide language and tools to support the development of integration solutions. Enterprises are always looking for how to optimise the use of resources, which includes their IT assets. Thus, buildingEAI solutions that allow to reuse actual data and functionality is mandatory to optimise the current or to provide support for the new business processes that emerge in an enterprise. The need for building EAI solutions has been pushing the development of languages and software tools, which can be used to model, implement, and run integration solutions. In the EAI community, the support for integration patterns is a trend, both in languages and software tools. In this chapter we introduce a software tool to support the realisation of Enterprise Application Integration. This tool is a Java-based software development kit that we provide to implement and run EAI solutions based on integration patterns. We have conducted a series of experiments to evaluate our proposal against real-world integration problems and the results indicate that it is viable and can be used to solve real-world integration problems.