What Is Enterprise Application Integration?

Application integration is the establishment of a unified comprehensive application, which is also about to integrate completely different application software and systems based on different platforms and different schemes into a seamless, parallel, and easily accessible single system. Make them like a whole for business processing and information sharing. Application integration consists of three layers: database, business logic, and user interface. It is a user-oriented application technology. Currently recognized by the industry, SOA is the best way to solve application integration.

Application integration

Application integration can be mainly used for service integration within and between enterprises. Through application integration, the network relationship between existing systems can be effectively improved, the relationship between systems can be more visualized, and management and control capabilities can be enhanced. Its high performance, high reliability, high scalability, and commercialization bring customers high management and control capabilities, high return on investment, and high operational capabilities, so as to improve the quality of IT services for the enterprise and more directly expand the business and business of the enterprise. Innovation, customer maintenance and operational excellence provide strong guarantees.

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As service-oriented and cloud-based architectures stand out, IT departments are increasingly focusing on good integration design. In order to avoid the potential dangers of too fast cloud application integration, the architecture needs to be carefully planned; similarly, the development process applied to complex SOA system upgrade-based designs is the same. As application integration requires more flexibility and universal applicability, optimized design is more important than ever. In the upcoming integration of cloud computing applications, integration-centric cloud computing, like iPaaS, shows the rapid growth of the number of cloud applications, and it will also face more complex integration and practical challenges in the future ^[1] .

Many platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and cloud computing enthusiasts are keen to commit to faster integrated development. However, according to the thought of early cloud users, the need for speed is exactly the biggest trap in this process.

Pradip Sitaram is the CIO of Enterprise Community Partners Ltd. He pointed out that enterprises fail to see the potential dangers of rushing to deploy cloud applications. When daily requirements and tests are ignored, they will be in danger of dangerous supervision. Sitaram also explains why his own team took the time to orchestrate the best design methods for their cloud-based systems. "Integration is a record of good architecture, otherwise it is not," he said. He warned PaaS and cloud computing in the market: Don't compromise on software development processes in exchange for integrated development speed.

Medical and health institutions seeking system upgrades need to fight against multiple sector services and applications that need to be unified. Michael Sanchez, the chief web architect of Sharp Healthcare, recently explored using the ESB joint portal to integrate medical health record information in three separate applications in use to build an effective SOA-based system.

Sharp Healthcare uses Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle WebLogic Suite to support the mySharp patient portal, which runs on the Oracle Service Bus. Sanchez noted that the use of Oracle's ESB is important for the same separate system, ensuring that they work together to generate a response for the patient in question. Sanchez said that Sharp Healthcare can add new back-end patient care as needed, and is expected to expand the portal to include other systems in the hospital.

With the implementation of cloud computing architecture, middleware integration challenges have emerged. In the early stages of cloud application integration, the so-called integration-centric cloud computing was based on "infrastructure as a service (IaaS)", "platform as a service (PaaS)" or "integrated platform as a service (iPaaS)". Includes extensive middleware services that work for successful cloud integration. However, iPaaS cloud integration also has its own unique challenges, especially security and data processing issues, and this complexity will continue to be maintained in cloud work.

As application integration requires more flexibility and adaptability to sudden changes, application programming interfaces (APIs) are becoming increasingly important in integration design. To this end, the API adds support for REST interfaces, which also requires more overall design methods and allows for a wider range of work situations.

At the Gartner AADI conference, Gartner vice president and analyst Daniel Sholler cited the universality of the REST architecture as the reason for its popularity among developers and the ability of REST to successfully cooperate with third-party cloud and mobile applications. Moreover, the application of REST principles for Web service design, which Sholler calls Web-oriented architecture, or WOA, is based on the idea that design should be "fully application neutral" and "as universal as possible," according to Sholler. As cloud and mobile applications continue to expand, achieving neutrality in API design and ensuring that REST is only used where it is needed and that it works well is the key to successful integration design.

Quickly dive into application integration architecture

Application integration defines the principle of moving data between multiple applications to reduce the risk of inconsistencies and reduce the effort required to link applications with multiple manual updates. It contains a combination of database design and a pipeline of application data. Unsurprisingly, applications have been split into database-related and data-flow related, and this hasn't changed much.

What has changed is how we build our applications and how we host them. In recent years, Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been accepted as a formal IT principle, the componentization of applications themselves, the way in which applications are developed, and cloud computing and virtualization as new ways of hosting, all of which increase the importance of application integration. It also promotes the need for pipeline and automation required for application integration. When the senior management team wants to be more agile and achieve more efficient IT support, all these factors come together before the CIO, so it is important to find a systematic approach to these issues.

EA defines the business process architecture from a high level and derives application requirements from a high level definition. EA creates the need for more information sharing, but it also encourages users to meet the needs beyond traditional applications.

Impact of EA on application integration

The impact of EA on application integration lies in the database-centric concept of information integration. If business data is stored in a warehouse and can be used through queries, then the use of individual information is related to queries and analysis, and has nothing to do with specific applications.

The componentization of the application decomposes large and complete software into many small parts, and each small part is loosely coupled with other parts. The flow of information between components within the application must be very efficient, otherwise the work experience and productivity will be affected. Therefore, a lot of work has been done to improve the exchange of information between components. The tremendous role of mobile and mobile work encourages increasing componentization, as companies trying to solve these productivity issues need to be more efficient.

A major driver of componentization is component reuse, building multiple applications from a common set of components. Because components are reused between applications, the barriers to the application itself are broken, and application integration and component integration have become a trend. Component integration tools, such as service and message buses or service data definition languages, can now also be used to integrate applications.

Cloud computing and virtualization have broken the traditional barriers between applications or components and server resources. Servers are now part of the pool, and some may even be on public clouds outside the company. Any function can run anywhere, so it needs to be documented exactly where it runs so that other components can find it. Deploying applications dynamically means providing dynamic links between deployed components.

Application integration evolves as application development evolves

Because other aspects of application development are evolving, application integration is continuously improving. Agile operations have created requirements for new toolsets, and these tools have evolved into more sophisticated orchestration tools to deploy and link applications and components running on resource pools. These tools, along with evolution and improvement, have absorbed some functions that were once a traditional part of application integration.

These trends affect how databases and information flows are used to link the various components that IT supports for business processes. In the traditional concept, the most important trend in the field of application integration is no longer the only problem or even the most important problem. If you ask CIOs what is their biggest challenge today, application integration may not be the biggest, but three new elements may be.

The application integration perspective needs to adapt to this reality. EA drivers focus on analytics, software componentization, and the cloud, which will affect the movement of information and thus the way to resolve application integration. Tools supporting these three elements are already merging with each other, and application integration will obviously become an area that more and more tools will consider over time. ^[2]