Enterprise Application Integration at Work: How to Successfully Plan for EAI (A Wiley tech brief) Book

Enterprise Application Integration is aimed at those who have to make disparate legacy IT systems within a company or group of companies work together. Like all good solutions it starts out by teaching you to properly describe the problem.The authors talk about architecture, not code. To aid in this they introduce various terms to describe existing applications. These include stovepipe (vertically integrated) apps, client-server and COTS (commercial, off the shelf apps). They also discuss integration methods from standard APIs to "screen scraping", pulling data from specific memory locations in old text-based mainframe apps. The next step is to describe the solutions available: messaging architectures, object architectures and transaction architectures--which may all be used in a practical EAI solution. Then there's security. When bypassing existing log-ins on legacy apps, for example, or accessing information once only available to a specific, IT isolated, department, security is important. Which brings us to the authors' SAIM (Secure Application Integration Methodology). The final section gives advice on how to approach "unprecendented technology", new technology introduced as part of the EAI process.These people clearly know their stuff, but this book is far too short to impart it. As a consequence it tends to read like an unusually long and detailed press release with a heavy technical content. You, as a company, are unlikely to be doing this work yourself. But after reading this you will believe the authors' companies, Concept Five or Saga Software, can do it for you. --Steve PatientRead More