This site is a collection of articles, products and comments related to Enterprise Application Integration.

Why are integration projects hard? Here are some of the reasons:

• each component involved in the solution has its own domain model. A large effort is spent on mapping between components (data and processes) at the domain level. For example, an entity could be called Customer in one sub-system, Subscriber in another sub-system and Store in yet another one.
• there is a high degree of parallelism in the integrated solution and the design of concurrent applications is much more difficult than the sequential applications
• communication channels fail – error handling increases significant the design and development effort
• not easy to test because:
  • building the testing environment requires to deploy multiple components, each having its own persistent storage;
  • test data relies on the edge components that may not have been built to support testing;
  • validating test results is hard because of the many data transformations and timing;
  • automated regression testing is resource intensive;
  • performance testing is very hard;
• deployment requires coordination between changes to business processes, systems and data;
• final solution is hard to monitor and support.