B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Integration Patterns 79
Messaging APIs — Messaging APIs provide a flexible message oriented
interface that enables communication between message-based applications.
The API makes it easy for enterprises to write business applications
that asynchronously send and receive critical business data and events.
For instance, the Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM) enables
applications to send and receive document oriented XML messages
using a pure Java API. With the use of JAXM, application developers can
focus on building, sending, receiving and decomposing messages for their
applications instead of programming low level XML communications
routines.
Component/Object APIs — Object APIs provide interfaces that can be
used by applications to access different objects, which encapsulate the
data and business processes.
Several vendors of distributed component solutions such as DCOM,
CORBA and EJB provide APIs to access remote objects.
Data Management APIs — Data management APIs provide interfaces
containing methods for directly accessing and manipulating an
application's database or any other data source, internal or external to
the company. This API should not only allow the retrieval of downloaded
data or data in databases, it should also support data management
activities common to most applications. This API enables data
management applications to be integrated much like ordinary software
applications, as it provides a consistent, platform-independent interface
for integration.
A typical example of data management API is structured query
language (SQL). Each database vendor implements and supports its
own flavor of SQL. For example, Oracle provides PL/SQL, Sybase
provides transact SQL.
Sun's JDBC API is a Java API for accessing tabular data which
makes it easy to send SQL statements to relational database systems
and supports all dialects of SQL (see Figure 3.22). The JDBC API
consists of a set of classes and interfaces written in the Java programming
language that provides a standard API for tool/database developers and
makes it possible to write database applications using an all-Java API.
The JDBC API contains two major sets of interfaces: the first is the