Designing Web Services with the J2EE™ 1.4 Platform JAX-RPC, SOAP, and XML Technologies

6.1. Integration Requirements and Scenarios

Before delving in the details of the technologies, it is helpful to illustrate the major concerns for integrating enterprise information systems and to get a sense of the extent of the EAI problem. We discuss three types of integration scenarios: data integration, application integration, and business process integration. Often, an enterprise's integration needs span these different types.

6.1.1. Typical Integration Scenarios

Data integration involves integrating existing data living in different enterprise systems, and it often occurs when an enterprise relies on multiple types of database systems. For example, some database systems may be relational, others may be hierarchical or based on objects, ...