Application System Integration

There is often a need to integrate applications that use different technologies or that run on different platforms.

Many organizations are adopting XML technologies and web services to allow diverse application systems to communicate in real-time or near real-time.

Web Services use of a set of vendor neutral technologies and concepts that were designed to support real-time integration over an internal network or over the Internet:

• XML - Extensible Markup Language
• XSD - XML Schema Definition
• XSLT - Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation
• SOAP - Simple Object Access Protocol
• WSDL - Web Services Description Language
• UDDI - Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration

For example, a J2EE application system running on a Unix platform in the London branch of a company could "talk" with a .NET application running on a Windows platform in the New York branch of the same company.

Similarly, a company in Boston could electronically integrate with its suppliers and/or consumers by each implementing a set of compatible web services that would interact using these vendor-neutral technologies.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) leverages these technologies and a set of architectural principals to help ensure that web services built are in fact vendor neutral and reusable.