Application integration as discussed in this book can most easily be understood as the exchange of transaction data and the synchronization of master record data across business applications. As such, application integration has been around in some manner since the beginning of computerized business applications; it has always been one of the most complex, costly, and error-prone aspects of business applications. The holy grail of application integration technology has been and continues to be the simplification, ease, reduced cost, and improved accuracy of application integration.
Application integration started as a set of Object Management Group (OMG) standards and vendors attempts at creating defacto standards. One of the first standards from the OMG was the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) introduced in 1991. Other standards like the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) emerged from Microsoft. These standards, APIs, and transaction...