The App Integration Challenge
What's the number one challenge applications developers will face over the next five years? According to analysts at Gartner, it's the same one the businesses acquiring those applications will face: integration.
"In the past, developers didn't have to make [applications] work together because we had people doing the integration," Roy Schulte, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner Research, said during a session at the most recent Gartner ITxpo. "Now we've got applications talking to applications all over the place. And so it's something everybody has to do all the time."
"I cannot understand why this is not talked about more than it is," Schulte added.
He might not be hearing it, but developers are certainly talking about this app integration "challenge." Or at least they're thinking about it. Need evidence? How about Gartner's own stats, which show that 75 percent of all new applications being developed today use some kind of integration technology. Schulte pointed out that we can expect to see "integration logic" becoming another facet of the best-practices definition of applications, alongside presentation logic, business logic, and data logic. That's a huge change in application design. Need more evidence that developers and IT execs are thinking about application integration? Schulte's session was packed.
What developer working in the mainstream today could not know that the app he/she is building is going to be touched by other software? Even the schools are finally abandoning the old-style monolithic development styles, training their students instead for the fast-approaching service-oriented and event-driven world.
But Gartner does point out one worrying fact that may not be getting enough attention from the developer community: When you change the architecture of applications, you also have to change the middleware infrastructure running under those applications. "You can't do SOA using the kind of middleware you used for the past 20 years to build distributed applications," Schulte said. "Object request brokers, TP monitors, application servers, RPCs, sockets—-they're all great but they're not good for SOA and event-driven architecture. Therefore, you will have to change your underlying software infrastructure to use enterprise service buses."
The good news--or at least interesting news--is that stand-alone ESB products probably aren't long for this world. According to Schulte, it won't be long before most enterprises gain ESB functionality through other products that include them. The upcoming Windows Vista operating system, for example, includes the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) architecture. "You'll buy an integration suite from Tibco, WebMethods, IBM, or Oracle with an ESB in it," Schulte said. "You'll be using an ESB because it really is the right infrastructure for SOA and event-driven architectures, but you may not be choosing it."
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