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Types of Integration

As we see it, there are three kinds of integration:

We'll discuss each in more detail next.

Integration with Legacy Systems

As you saw in the R & R case, a lot of the company data and information has been scattered all over the enterprise. The benefits of creating a unified interface to all systems holding this information should be rather obvious. You also may have noticed it could be quite expensive and difficult to modify existing systems to provide, for example, a Web services interface to their features. A common way to solve this is to create a wrapper around them that exposes an interface to existing features, as well as to some new ones if necessary (see Figure 1-5).

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Figure 1-5: A wrapper to a legacy system built with .NET techniques

In this scenario, we have built a multilayer wrapper around the legacy system, exposing the features as Web services. We could also have exposed them as .NET Remoting objects, COM interfaces, or .NET enterprise applications, but that does not change the general design. In cases where the existing system cannot hold the new information necessary for new business needs, a separate database is implemented to store this data. An example of this is when it is not possible to store new information about customers in the existing database.

Note 

An important thing to remember is that if response times from legacy systems are slow, you might need to set up a new caching database of your own, and implement replication between them—at least if the legacy system is out of your control, and you cannot performance-tune it. The same thing goes for systems you do have control over, but cannot possibly tune more.

Integration with Actors Outside the Enterprise

With all the new business opportunities nowadays, it is essential that a company be able to communicate with the outside world. Messages, data, and information are exchanged between companies in an ever-increasing way. To solve this, we often use some kind of message broker, like Microsoft BizTalk Server (see Figure 1-6). In the case described here, our partners and customers have a wide choice of ways to transfer (and receive) information. This provides flexibility to incorporate our own services into the applications of the outside actors.

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Figure 1-6: An integration scenario using Microsoft BizTalk Server as a message broker

Integration of Business logic

When you design your applications, you should strive to make them open for other applications. If you expose your business logic as Web services, it is quite easy for other developers to integrate them into their applications. This way you can let various applications and devices use the same business logic, which cuts down the investments necessary to provide a flexible architecture (see Figure 1-7). The only thing that differs between the end-user interfaces is the way data is presented. Since this solution builds on de facto standards like XML and SOAP, you also make sure future applications can reuse your business logic.

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Figure 1-7: Different clients sharing the same business logic

We will now introduce you to another important topic in the computer world today: content management (CM). The basics will be covered here, and in Chapter 5 you will get a look at some of the tools you can use to manage your Web sites. We mention it here because this is a very big issue in many companies. The tools may seem too primitive at this juncture, but you can be sure they are going to evolve quickly during the coming years.


Team LiB
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