On the role of services in enterprise application integration

Abstract

Recent advances in Web and middleware technologies offer a promising solution for a number of enterprise integration problems. The convergence of the Internet and distributed-object technologies, which has been referred to as the Internet's third wave, extends this "information-based" Internet to a worldwide "services-based" Web. In this paper we present a model for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and we discuss the role of emerging technologies, as they relate to the specification of services, registration of services, data integration, and control integration.