B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

88 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
messaging and distributed objects. RPC is a procedural model, which
primarily supports synchronous calls. In addition, RPC carries a
significant amount of network overhead — it can be network hog. The
many levels of services, which once made RPC appealing, also created
the performance bottlenecks which make it very slow across large
networks.
3.4.3. Application oriented integration and B2Bi
The applications to be integrated for B2Bi support different business
lines of individual companies. This bag of application consist of a mix
of home developed applications, third party solutions (such as ERP,
CRM, SCM) and legacy systems. Their integration with the applications
of the trading partners is much more than just making a remote method
call or making one component talk to another remote component.
It is a fairly straightforward task to integrate two applications
developed by a single company using the same language and running
on the same platform. However, integrating applications developed and
maintained by different companies using different programming language
and running on different platforms is an extremely daunting effort.
For a successful implementation of this integration pattern, companies
have to give away autonomy and develop applications in close
cooperation with the partners. Making any changes to support new
business logic or technical feature requires informing and coordinating
with the partners, which makes this integration pattern the least flexible
of all the integration patterns. Because of its inflexibility, which requires
making coding changes for every small change in business flow, this
integration pattern is also the most expensive in the long run. It creates
dependency that can have a major impact on the business operations of
the companies participating in B2Bi.
Application oriented integration also requires making strict
authentication checks before executing the function or method. The call
to functions or methods can contain malicious code as it is usually
made over the Internet. Furthermore, in order for the client programs to
make RPCs or API calls, a company needs to open its firewall, which
can pose security threats. Finally, A2A integration does not help a
company to improve business processes.