Availability Guide for Application Design

Improving Availability on the Internet
Availability Guide for Application Design—525637-004
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Standards and Application Integration
NLP provides the flexibility for enterprises to create geographic business regions,
business division regions, function-oriented regions, or customer-oriented regions.
Standards and Application Integration
Enterprise application integration (EAI) is rapidly evolving to embrace standards such
as Java, Java Messaging Service (JMS), and Java Connector Architecture (JCA) for
creating adapters for off-the-shelf and custom applications. Major EAI vendors such as
BEA, SeeBeyond, TIBCO, and webMethods are adopting these standards, most of
which are based on standard Java.
New technologies for business process management (BPM), also called workflow, are
being adopted by companies to extract business processes from applications and
manage them separately, without having to change their applications, to gain flexibility.
The BPM technology quickly found its way in EAI products and is going through a
process of standardization in Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and
BPEL for Java (BPELJ) technology.
One of the key EAI technologies is the transformation of messages to and from
different formats to enable heterogeneous applications to talk to each other. Although
all EAI vendors provide transformation capabilities, they vary significantly from product
to product. Some are based solely on XML using Extensible Stylesheet Language
Transformation (XSLT) and more recently XML Query (XQuery), while others use fast
transformation engines (for example, Ascential DataStage TX).
The rapid evolution of Web services standards is positioning that technology as a good
fit for application integration. Standard-based and legacy Pathway applications can be
exposed easily as standard Web services. Figure 3-2 shows Web services standards
and the NonStop server platform.