A Component and Service Based Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) Framework

摘要

Enterprise application integration (EAI) refers to plans, methods, and tools of integrating applications and data sources in an enterprise. Traditional EAI solutions, done with middleware, application adapters, and numerous customer codes, are usually expensive and time-consuming. Two emerging information technologies, component-based development (CBD) and web services, can potentially address the challenges. A component and service based EAI framework is presented in this paper. The framework is a non-proprietary design with well-defined interfaces. This paper also improves a specification modelling method of enterprise software components. In this paper, the first section gives a brief introduction of background information. Then, state-of-the-art in EAI, concepts of CBD and web services are reviewed. In the third section, a new component and service based EAI framework is presented. Main contents this section include, 1) an overview of the framework; 2) An improved UML-based description of component specifications; and 3) major benefits and challenges of the proposed framework are listed. The last section of the paper is a summary of this paper.