This closed and proprietary nature
of enterprise systems makes integration between enterprise applications very
difficult. To allow enterprise systems to effectively communicate between each other,
system integrators would use vendor-supplied APIs and data formats or agree on
common exchange mechanisms between their systems. This is fine for small short
term integration, but quickly becomes unproductive as the number of enterprise
applications to integrate gets larger. The following figure shows the problems with
traditional integration.
As we can see in the figure, each third party system that we want to integrate with
uses a different protocol. As a system integrator, we potentially have to learn new
technologies and new APIs for each system we wish to integrate with. If there are
only two or three systems to integrate with, this is not really too much of a problem.
However, the more systems we wish to integrate with, the more proprietary code we
have to learn and integration with other systems quickly becomes a large problem.
To try and overcome these problems, the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
server was introduced. This concept has an integration server acting as a central
hub. The EAI server traditionally has proprietary links to third party systems, so the
application integrator only has to learn one API (the EAI server vendors).
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