An architecture for efficient, flexible enterprise system integration

Integrating complex enterprise systems is challenging and reliability and performance of the integrated systems can be problematic when using typical solutions of distributed transactions or on-demand message-based querying. We describe a data-oriented approach for enterprise system integration that uses information brokering. A broker application isolates the interactions between a local enterprise application server and a wide variety of remote systems, performing data acquisition, storage, transformation, update and status management. We describe a prototype book brokering system developed using Java 2 Enterprise Edition, CORBA, Java Messaging Service and Web Services and using our integration strategy. We outline the architecture, design and implementation of this prototype and summarise our experiences with this information integration technique.