Patterns: Broker Interactions for Intra- and Inter-enterprise

28 Broker Interactions for Intra- and Inter-enterprise

2.3.6 Standards compliance

Standards compliance is concerned with identifying and applying the appropriate

standards to a scenario. Standards compliance is an important factor for

controlling development and integration costs. Even private standards are

beneficial, but widely accepted public standards have the added advantage of

enabling interoperability in the broadest contexts.

2.3.7 Transactionality

A transaction can be viewed as an activity between two or more parties that must

be completed in its entirety with the mutually agreed outcome. Transactionality

enables multiple application operations to be coordinated to provide an atomic

deterministic end result.

Resource managers are used to control access to the resources involved in a

transaction. A transaction manager is responsible for coordination and

transaction control. Transactional considerations include:

򐂰 ACID versus compensating transactions

򐂰 Flat versus nested transactions

򐂰 System versus client commit control

򐂰 Local versus distributed transactions

2.4 Application patterns for Application Integration

Using the interaction classification framework introduced in this chapter in

Figure 2-11 as a guide, we observe the following four Application patterns and

their variations for Process-focused Application Integration (also known as

intra-enterprise integration):

򐂰 Direct Connection Application pattern

and its Message/Call Connection variations

Allows a single interaction from the source application to be adapted and

transported to one target application

򐂰 Broker Application pattern

and its Router variation

Allows a single interaction from the source application to be switched, split,

and joined to multiple target applications concurrently

򐂰 Serial Process Application pattern

and its Serial Workflow variation

Allows a single interaction from the source application to execute a series of

interactions with multiple target applications