Enterprise Application Integration

You must have heard about the recent buzzing technologies – EAI, SeeBeyond or JCAPS. If you were wondering what this EAI and SeeBeyond or JCAPS is all about then you are at the right place.

Technologies So Far
Till now most of the organizations were involved in developing independent applications running on a cross-section of hardware systems. And when an application was dependent on the data or outputs from another application it was a cumbersome job for the coders and more so if the other application was written in some other language or for some other platform. And due to this it sometimes became impossible to integrate the applications and make them work together using the data from each other and in most cases it was a tough job to maintain and support the application integrations. The Solution here was provided by EAI.

What is EAI?

EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) is the technology where different applications based on different technologies running on different platforms and with different business process models and different data models are integrated to work together. Each application is defined in terms of well-defined messages (data) going in and out. And processing on each of these messages is clearly defined.

EAI makes the enterprise a network of applications all connected to the centralized Middleware framework called the Information Bus. The Information Bus transparently routes the messages (Data) between applications ensuring transactional consistency. Information Bus communicates over the network including Internet.

Purposes of EAI:

• Data (information) Integration: ensuring that information in multiple systems is kept consistent.
• Process Integration: linking business processes across applications running on different or same platforms.
• Application Integration: linking applications based on different technologies and business protocols.
• B2B : includes all components to design and execute business applications
• Workflow: ensures a proper flow of data between different modules/processes of various applications.

Prominent EAI tools

• Tibco
• SeeBeyond (now called JCAPS)
• WebMethods