What is Enterprise Application Integration?
EAI, although not a buzzword anymore, is far from being an easy or well-defined task. Indeed, it has become one of the most difficult problems facing enterprise application development in the last few years. The major challenges relate to the integration of the different domains, architectures, and technologies. If we wish to integrate, we must also find ways to allow the coexistence of different architectures, and solve problems inherent with integrating several different technologies. In addition to all of this, we also have to look closely at application content in order to solve the problems of data redundancy and different views of the same problem. These conceptual challenges may be more difficult to overcome than the technical ones. To make things even more difficult, there is often a significant investment already in place for a variety of application integration technologies that we must deal with. Furthermore, the requirements placed on information systems are both growing si
