The Age of Integration

I disagree with Jonathan Schwartz, regarding the age of participation.

In my opinion, the age of participation is better marked by the invention of the printing press, and then renewed by the invention of the telephone. Those technologies enabled many generations of people to participate in worldly activities (and become educated in matters of the world) unlike any generation that came before.

Instead, I think it’s the "Age of Integration." The web, more than anything else, has caused a huge amount of integration to occur between computers, networks, databases, applications, and so on.

Furthermore, the amount of integration is seemingly increasing, as seen by the growing popularity of web services and related technologies. Server technology; frameworks; web service technology; the enterprise service bus; XML; these technologies are all about integrating disparate computer systems and their related data.

If anyone is going to get credit for the modern age of participation, it may better go to AOL as it enabled people to chat with one another in chat rooms, in very large numbers, back in the mid-90’s. Instant messenger technology was quickly born from that, with ICQ, AOL, Yahoo!, and Microsoft offering IM networks soon after.

Java and Integration

Java, with its write once, run anywhere promise, along with the fact that it’s still the most popular Web application technology, is the king of integration in my opinion. Java EE 5, for instance, contains more tools and support for Java-based web services, such as NetBeans 5.5 and JAX-WS 2.0, than any version of enterprise Java that came before.

Sun recently released an article on how to build high-performance web services with JAX-WS and Java EE 5. The article compares JAX-WS with its predecessor, JAX-RPC, and discusses its new features such as support for asynchronous messaging, HTTP and non-HTTP transports, and improved performance, especially for large message payloads.

BEA, Oracle, and Open-source

Sun is not the only company with server technology to support Java-based web services. Both BEA, with its AquaLogic product, and Oracle, with its Fusion middleware, are two excellent examples of products that aim to make it easier to build Java SOA solutions.

As for open-source solutions, there’s Apache Axis (which makes it very easy to build both SOAP-based servers and clients and technology), along with over a dozen other Apache open-source frameworks and tools. To integrate those services and aggregate them into new applications and business processes, there is open-source enterprise service bus (ESB) software you can use, such as ServiceMix from LogicBlaze –- now an Apache Incubator project –- and Mule from CodeHaus.

What’s your opinion on the age of integration? What percentage of your applications and projects are related to integrating other applications, and/or their data? Further, what role has Java played in your integration work? Let me know by replying to this blog below.

-EJB

Posted by Eric Bruno at 02:08 AM  Permalink