|
Standardized Intergration? - Java Business Integration (JSR–208)
by Benoy Jose
Introduction
One of the most promising and important areas of the Internet
today is Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). Millions
of applications need to integrate with each other as customer
demands for interoperability rise. One of the biggest problems
facing these diverse applications is their difficulty to
integrate easily with each other. One of the prime reasons for
their incompatibility is the incompatibility of the underlying
technology. Most of the earlier languages, systems and
applications were built in the earlier part of the IT
revolution, they were made with minimal industry standards and
almost no interoperability support. Now when these systems need
to be integrated they need multiple interfaces to talk to each
other. Each time a new system needs to be integrated a new
interface is built to fulfill the integration need.
JBI proposes a standard based architecture for integration that
allows disparate systems to expose themselves in an independent
manner and leave the responsibility of integration to the JBI
environment. The third party components will provide all the
functions and interfaces required to interface with it. The JBI
environment will host multiple components like these and ensure
these components can interoperate amongst each other. A new client
that needs to integrate with an existing component will have to
communicate with the JBI environment and let the JBI environment
take care of routing the request to the appropriate component
and returning the result.
Architecture
The JBI architecture is a messaging based architecture. The idea
is to bridge disparate systems, by making them communicate
through messages. Traditional EAI systems create a separate
bridge connection for a unique combination of applications to be
paired. This results in numerous bridge connections, which
aren't scalable and are difficult to maintain.
Modern EAI systems alleviate the above-discussed problems by
providing XML based integration. The XML based integration is
more elegant and scalable but needs all data to be converted into and
from XML. Traditional EAI approaches rely heavily on
vendor specific approaches and tools provided by the vendor,
thereby limiting their scalability. Moreover involvement with
vendor specific APIs forces vendor lock in and limits the
scalability of the system.
JBI proposes to eliminate vendor specific integration solutions
by defining a standards based Integration framework. The JBI API
proposes to have a Standard environment where integration
components from multiple vendors will reside and be offered as
services to clients. These components provide specific services,
which can be combined to form specific integration solutions.
The services provided by the JBI are based on WSDL and web
services.
The key components of the Java Business Integration framework
are Service Engines (SE), Binding component (BC) and the
Normalized message service (NMS).
Service engines or SEs provide the actual business logic and
conversions required for a service. SEs can consume other
services and components. The Binding components are interfaces
exposed to clients. The binding components can take input from
the clients and talk to the appropriate service engines and then
return the result to the requested client in the format they
require. BCs might require communicating with external clients
in different protocols and then converting the message into a
JBI specific format and vice versa.
The NMS acts as a messenger between the SEs and the BCs. The NMS
takes care of the conversion of formats from the SE to BC and
vice versa. All these components are detailed in the sections
below.
Apart from support for these core components the JBI
specification defines how life cycle management, administration,
reconfiguration and environmental configuration can be done in
the JBI framework.
New on the Java Boutique:
New Review:
Time Management Made Easy with the Quartz Enterprise Job Scheduler
Why not just use the Java timer API? This open source scheduling
API boasts simplicity, ease-of-integration, a well-rounded feature
set, and it's free!
New Applet:
Reverse Complement
Reverse Complement is a simple applet that converts DNA or RNA
sequences into three useful formats.
Elsewhere on internet.com:
WebDeveloper Java
Lots of Java information on webdeveloper.com
WDVL Java
Thorough Java resource at the Web Developer's Virtual Library.
ScriptSearch Java
Hundreds of free Java code files to download.
jGuru: Your View of the Java Universe
Customizable portal with online training, FAQs, regular news updates, and tutorials.
| 
