Despite the wide variety of useful and comprehensive books and other publications on the subject of integration, the approaches that they describe often lack practical relevance. The basic issue involves, on the one hand, deciding how to divide an integration solution into individual areas so that it meets the customer requirements, and on the other hand, how it can be implemented with a reasonable amount of effort. In this case, this means structuring it in such a way that standardized, tried-and-tested basic components can be combined to form a functioning whole, with the help of tools and products. For this reason, the Trivadis Integration Architecture Blueprint subdivides the integration layer into further layers. This kind of layering is not common in technical literature, but it has been proven to be very useful in practice. It allows any type of integration problem to be represented, including traditional ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load), classic EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), EDA (event-driven architecture), and grid computing. This idea is reflected in the structure of the book.
Chapter 1, Basic Principles, covers the fundamental integration concepts. This chapter is intended as an introduction for specialists who have not yet dealt with the subject of integration.
Chapter 2, Base Technologies, describes a selection of base technologies. By far the most important of these are transaction strategies and their implementation, as well as process modeling. In addition, Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA), Java Business Integration (JBI), Service Component Architecture (SCA), and Service Data Objects (SDO) are explained. Many other base technologies are used in real-life integration projects, but these go beyond the scope of this book.
Chapter 3, Integration Architecture Blueprint, describes the Trivadis Integration Architecture Blueprint. The process of layering integration solutions is fully substantiated, and each step is explained on the basis of the division of work between the individual layers. After this, each of the layers and their components are described.
Chapter 4, Implementation Scenarios, demonstrates how the Trivadis Integration Architecture Blueprint represents the fundamental integration concepts that have been described in Chapter 1. We will use the blueprint with its notation and visualization to understand some common integration scenarios in a mostly product-neutral form. We will cover traditional, as well as modern, SOA-driven integration solutions.
Chapter 5, Vendor Products for Implementing the Trivadis Blueprint, completes the book with a mapping of some vendor platforms to the Trivadis Integration Architecture Blueprint.
Appendix, References holds a list of all the referenced books and articles. It's a collection of additional important and interesting material covering modern SOA-driven as well as traditional integration solution.