The purpose of any system integration is to bind two or more different systems together to work as a whole. You can find system integration tasks in any area of business or technology. In this chapter, we'll discuss integration by means of software technologies.

The history of software-intensive system integration is almost as old as the history of computer systems themselves. Even in the early days of computers, people experienced a need to connect systems developed on different hardware platforms, operating systems, and systems that used different data formats and ran in different locations. Early methods of integration were as simple as taking printouts from one computer to another and entering the data manually. Today, we have integration tools and processes as big as the Internet itself.

In this chapter, we shall provide an introduction to software-intensive system integration from an architect's point of view. We shall discuss different...