Why a New Layer?

Traditional middleware such as MOM (message-queuing software and pub/sub engines) solves only part of the application integration problem. Integration servers, by building on top of existing middleware technology, address the other part. This makes integration servers the “middleware of middleware” (see Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1. Integration servers can integrate many different types of middleware, as well as applications and databases.

An effective application integration solution contains a number of components that are neither middleware nor applications, but are routing, reformatting, and flow components. Although these components ...

Get Next Generation Application Integration: From Simple Information to Web Services now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.