The Road to e-Business Integration

Businesses operate today in a diverse environment. They interact with a wide variety of clients, both inside and outside of the enterprise, and they rely on disparate systems and processes to power their business activities. In this kind of environment, businesses face an integration challenge. To fully maximize their resources, businesses strive to bring together their internal systems and processes to gain operational efficiency, and they strive to extend those systems and processes to their trading partners to increase revenue.

WebLogic Integration is a single, unified platform that provides the functionality businesses can use to develop new applications, integrate them with existing systems, streamline business processes, and connect with trading partners. Using WebLogic Integration, businesses can integrate enterprise adapters for application integration, collaboration arrangements between trading partners, and business processes, resulting in composite applications that provide end-to-end business integration.

To begin our introduction to WebLogic Integration, we look at business systems today, and the functionality WebLogic Integration provides to integrate those systems. These topics are discussed in the following sections:

• The Integration Challenge

• Integration Solutions

• BEA WebLogic Integration

 

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The Integration Challenge

Modern business systems are a complex mix of Web-based, wireless, custom-built, commercial, and legacy applications. Many of these systems—especially legacy applications—are deeply entrenched, and represent a substantial investment in development, deployment, training, and maintenance.

Figure 1-1 Business Systems Today

 

 

As Figure  1-1 suggests, business systems that drive the enterprise have some or all of the following characteristics:

• Use a variety of communication protocols: FTP, TCP/IP, HTTP, IIOP, and SOAP, among others

• Include middleware applications for distributed computing, based on a variety of standards and architectures: CORBA, RMI, and DCOM, among others

• Support a variety of data formats: binary, relational, proprietary, and XML, among others

• Include different implementation technologies: C, Cobol, and JCL, among others

• Run on a variety of different platforms: Microsoft Windows, variants of UNIX, VAX/VMS, and S/390, among others

To take full advantage of this variety of systems and processes, businesses look to integration solutions that can integrate their internal systems with those of their trading partners to manage complex business relationships.

 

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Integration Solutions

Integration solutions address two kinds of integration: intra-enterprise and inter-enterprise. Intra-enterprise integration involves linking together the types of applications shown in Figure  1-1, and the internal business processes that interact with them. It also includes mapping data between the various systems.

Inter-enterprise integration, on the other hand, extends a corporation's internal data and processes by linking them with customers and other corporate enterprises. This type of integration enables heterogeneous enterprises to interact in diverse business transactions that can be complex and long-running.

 

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BEA WebLogic Integration

WebLogic Integration is a single, unified platform that provides the functionality to integrate business systems within an enterprise, and to link those systems in a collaborative arrangement with an organization's trading partners.

Figure 1-2 BEA WebLogic Integration

 

 

Underlying this functionality is the industry-leading J2EE application server, BEA WebLogic Server, which provides the critical infrastructure needed to develop integrated solutions, including transaction management, security, fault tolerance, persistence, and clustering.

WebLogic Integration enables intra- and inter-enterprise integration by providing functionality in the following areas:

• Business process management

• Application integration

• B2B integration

• Data integration

The following sections outline the key features in each of these areas of functionality.

Business Process Management

The business process management functionality of WebLogic Integration enables integration specialists to develop, run, and maintain complex e-business processes that integrate existing enterprise systems, cross-enterprise applications, and human decision makers. The following table lists the key features of business process management.

Table 1-1 Business Process Management Features  

Key Feature	Description
Design, monitoring, and run-time interaction with business processes	WebLogic Integration Studio provides the functionality integration specialists use to design and monitor business processes, and to interact with running processes.
Run-time interaction with business processes	WebLogic Integration Worklist enables end users to interact with running business processes. Note: The Worklist client application is being deprecated as of this release of WebLogic Integration. For information about the features that are replacing it, see the BEA WebLogic Integration Release Notes.
APIs for BPM client application development	Used to develop a variety of custom client applications: Configuration clients Design clients Run-time management clients Monitoring clients
Plug-in framework	Software that enables: Development of plug-ins that extend the default design or run-time behavior of workflow components Integration of other areas of functionality in WebLogic Integration with business processes
Sample business processes	Examples that show how to use the Studio to design business processes, and how to develop plug-ins

 

Application Integration

The application integration functionality of WebLogic Integration greatly simplifies the integration of existing internal enterprise systems with each other and with new e-business applications. The following table lists the key features of application integration.

Table 1-2 Application Integration Features  

Key Feature	Description
Application integration framework	Standards-based architecture for hosting J2EE Connector Architecture (J2EE CA)-based adapters Application View Console for the development and management of application views
Integration with business processes	Plug-in framework enables the integration of application views with business processes
Adapter Developer Kit (ADK)	Collection of frameworks that developers can use to develop J2EE CA-compliant adapters
Sample adapters	J2EE CA-compliant sample adapters that developers can use to learn how to develop adapters using the ADK

 

B2B Integration

The B2B integration functionality of WebLogic Integration enables the integration of trading partners over the Internet, and the integration of EDI environments with WebLogic Integration. The following table lists the key features of B2B integration features.

Table 1-3 B2B Integration Features  

Key Feature	Description
B2B integration framework	Services for messaging, connectivity, and business protocols that support collaboration between trading partners B2B Console for the configuration and management of conversations, trading partners, collaboration agreements, business protocols, and more
Integration with business processes	Plug-in framework enables the integration of trading partner conversations with business processes
APIs and logic plug-ins for B2B application development	APIs to develop custom management and messaging applications, and to enable message logging Logic plug-ins to enable specialized processing of business messages
Sample applications	Examples that developers can use to model B2B integration solutions
Business protocol support	Support for RosettaNet, cXML, ebXML, and XOCP Note: The cXML and XOCP business protocols are deprecated as of this release of WebLogic Integration. For information about the features that are replacing them, see the BEA WebLogic Integration Release Notes.
EDI integration	Functionality that includes Power.Enterprise!, an EDI-capable system, to enable the integration of WebLogic Integration with EDI environments

 

Data Integration

The data integration functionality of WebLogic Integration enables the translation of binary data to XML, and the transformation of XML grammars. The following table lists the key features of data integration.

Table 1-4 Data Integration Features  

Key Feature	Description
Data translation	Enables the translation of binary data to XML, and vice versa Format Builder tool for the development of binary-to-XML maps
Data translation samples	Examples that illustrate the use of workflow actions for data translation
Data transformation	Enables the transformation of one XML grammar to another Contivo Analyst for the development of XSL stylesheets that map XML grammars
Integration with business processes	Plug-in framework enables the integration of data translation functionality with business processes XSL Transform workflow action enables the integration of data transformation functionality with business processes