B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) 103
portal can provide a unified HTML interface to legacy systems, CRM
and ERP applications, messaging services, external Websites, etc. An
example of a popular portal site is my.Yahoo.com, which consolidates
news, weather, sports and e-mail, among other things, into a single
unified Website.
4.5.2. Data integration
Data integration occurs at the database and data source level within an
organization. The integration is achieved by migrating data from one
data source to another. Most companies today employ some form of
data integration to achieve a primitive, yet necessary EAI model.
There are a bevy of data replication and middleware tools to facilitate
data transfer between data sources in both real-time and batch modes.
Some data integration methods include:
• Batch Transfer;
• Data Union; and
• Data Replication.
Data integration is the most prevalent form of EAI in existence
today. Data integration solutions are inexpensive and they often achieve
the desired results. One of the biggest problems with data integration is
that the business logic usually exists only within the primary system,
limiting real-time transactional capabilities.
4.5.3. Function or method integration
Function or method integration involves the direct and rigid applicationto-application
(A2A) integration of cross-platform applications over a
network. It can range from custom code (COBOL, C++, Java), to
application programming interfaces (APIs), to remote procedure calls
(RPCs), to distributed middleware such as TP monitors, distributed
objects, common object request broker architecture (CORBA), Java
remote method invocation (RMI), message oriented middleware (MOM)
and Web services (see Figure 4.4).