Integrating on the front end with lightweight architecture

Today's cornucopia of Web services calls for a new approach to Web development – one that puts quick-to-understand data ahead of complicated traditional frameworks. We help you understand your options for creating Web apps that use other companies' sites as easily as calling a function.

By Peter Yared, LinuxWorld.com, 01/01/07

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Integration is the third rail of enterprise IT. The mere mention of the word raises terrifying thoughts of huge budgets, endless meetings, and extremely complicated software. Integration projects can be daunting, often requiring the skills of highly specialized IT staff.

It doesn't have to be that hard! On the open Web, countless sites have circumvented the headaches associated with expensive, drawn-out integration to quickly and easily integrate various data sources. As these sites suggest, a lot of corporate integration projects – things like consolidating employee phonebooks after a merger – can actually be done quite easily with Web 2.0 technologies that have been updated for the enterprise. This new approach to integration emphasizes a lightweight architecture that shifts IT's focus from the back end to the front end. As a result, an organization can reduce its backlog of integration projects and dedicate its top people to genuinely difficult challenges such as supply chain integration.

Given the challenges of previous computing eras, FOI (Fear of Integration) is understandable. In the 1970s, getting two computers to talk to each other was pretty straightforward. IT laid a physical wire between the two machines, developed a proprietary protocol, messed around on either end for a while, and presto, the two machines were talking to each other. Needless to say, this integration was very expensive and cumbersome. Computers generally were hooked up to each other only if the need was very pressing and the machines were in close geographic proximity to one another.

Later, when a machine had to talk to more than a handful of other machines, packet switching networks based on protocols like X.25 arose. Two companies that participated in the same network could send data to each other once they negotiated a common data format. This type of integration fostered the evolution of closed supply chain systems like electronic data interchange.

When the Internet opened for commercial use, anyone could connect to anyone else with a variety of open protocols, yet there was still no standard for data format. Getting divisions within a company, let alone multiple companies, to interact with each other was still very complicated.

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