The Ikasan Enterprise Integration Platform (EIP) addresses the problem domain most commonly known as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI).
Enterprise application integration can be, and already has been, approached a number of different ways by a number of projects/vendors, both Open Source and closed commercial frameworks.
It is the intention of the Ikasan Enterprise Integration Platform to address this domain as commoditised configurable solutions rather than another development framework.
- System integration can be exponentially complex
- It is commonly agreed that “spaghetti integration” is bad
- It results in a bleed out of APIs; data syntax; and business semantics
- Ripple effect of change is massive
- Use Standard Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) approach
- Provision of an Event/Service backbone
- Single point of integration for Enterprise Information System (EIS) business flows
- Ripple effect of change is localised and well understood (assuming best practice)
- Ikasan adopts the standard EAI approach and helps users solve integration problems by building applications constructed of modules/flows/components
- An Integration Module is a high level logical construct
- It provides a logical grouping of business operations as a single integration point
- These integration points can be either a source, a target, or bi-directional business flows
- Integration modules comprise of one or more related flows
- Flows are cohesive operations on a business artifact as an atomic operation
- Multiple flows can be chained to isolate concerns
- Ikasan defines only light-weight event containers so as to remain agnostic to the data being transported
- Flows comprise of flow components which have implementation injected as Plain Old Java objects (POJOs)
- Components are individual operations acting on events within a flow
- There are different types of components based on industry standard EAI Integration Patterns including,
- Consumers
- Converters
- Translators
- Splitters
- Aggregators
- Brokers
- Filters
- Sequencers
- Routers
- Producers
- Standard re-useable components are available within Ikasan as well as being able to simply develop your own custom components
- Core services are automatically bound to each flow
- Service APIs support management of the flow, runtime status, resubmission, and replay