Application Integration is challenging in today’s enterprises due to the complexity imposed by the use of diverse applications involving heterogeneous software and hardware environments.

Enterprises in all sectors—telecommunications, biotechnology, manufacturing, finance, and others—have become increasingly dependent on IT and on the applications they develop, acquire, or customize. A typical enterprise has a wide spectrum of Web-based, wireless, legacy, custom-built, and canned applications operating on large amounts of information (see Figure 33.1). The information collected by these applications typically needs to be aggregated and analyzed to make strategic decisions. Many of these diverse applications, at different information points, are very specific to the line-of-business function they are designed for. Hence, it is becoming increasingly difficult to integrate them into a new application for a similar or a dependent business need, let alone integrating with existing applications such as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application or a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application.

Figure 33.1. Integration points in an enterprise.

Custom “one-off” integration solutions have been used for the past two to three decades, but modern enterprises are moving away from them because they are very expensive to maintain and impossible to extend to standards-based, simplified, and extensible integration solutions when new applications are infused into the organization.

WebLogic Integration (WLI) is a standards-based framework with a set of services built on top of the BEA WebLogic Server. It provides a framework for Business Process Management (BPM), Application Integration (AI) using J2EE Connector Architecture (J2CA), business-to-business (B2B), and data integration. This chapter provides a high-level introduction to the WLI product and its constituent components and products (BPM, AI framework, B2B, and data integration), which will provide context to the subsequent chapters in Part VIII, “Integration Services Provided by WebLogic Server 7.”

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) projects that were typically undertaken to connect two packaged applications prove to be very resource-intensive because they typically require the use of proprietary technologies. If a company using an EAI solution tries to embrace e-business, the cost and complexity associated with integration multiply as each new Web-based system must be connected to the existing systems.

It has become increasingly difficult to find a single software solution that can help address two or more business requirements. Companies that buy “best of breed” applications are then required to put development resources together to integrate the applications when the need arises. The Gartner Group (July 2001) estimated that up to 68% of software development resources are being spent these days on “gluing together” applications. This proves to be very expensive, and if a custom and nonstandard proprietary “gluing” technology is used, it adds to the problem, especially when the need to integrate with another system in the future arises.

The point-to-point integration approach to Application Integration is quick to implement but very difficult to maintain, extend, and is error prone. This is due to the fact that there is no central negotiator that manages interactions between applications being integrated. The complexity in point-to-point integration solutions increases exponentially as new systems are added. Company takeovers, mergers, and reorganizations are factors that add to this challenge. These proprietary systems were developed and are in existence partly because not many standards existed around Application Integration until the late ’90s. Other solutions, which use the Integration Broker approach where there is a central negotiator, involve technologies such as message-oriented or Object Request Broker (ORB) middleware, but their success is limited to local networks. Modern enterprises are becoming intelligent and more aware about how standards can facilitate integration.

The new-generation Application Integration solutions, like BEA WebLogic Integration, take a standards-based approach. This approach is fast to implement and easier to manage. It helps enterprises that develop solutions in house, System Integrators, and Enterprise Information Service vendors. Enterprise computing in general has embraced the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard.

The use of standards guarantees interoperability for enterprise technologies. Standards such as the Java Messaging Service (JMS)—which provides the standard API to message transport systems—and the J2EE Connector Architecture (J2CA) standard—which helps connect to heterogeneous enterprise systems such as ERP, CRM, mainframe-based systems, and database systems—are making Application Integration a great deal easier. For example, a CRM vendor can easily provide a resource adapter so that its product can plug in any solution that supports J2EE Connector Architecture. Application Integration providers are creating resource adapters for legacy systems like mainframes on which many mission-critical applications still run. Solutions that adhere to such transport standards as HTTP, SMTP, HTML, and SOAP make it much easier to integrate.

The J2CA standard provides a single access interface to enterprise applications analogous to JDBC, providing standardized access to various relational databases.

There is still a long way to go as far as standards are concerned. Standards like SOAP currently do not cover security and transaction aspects. However, at the same time, companies are promoting initiatives such as Transaction Authority Markup Language (XAML) to enable Web services with transactional properties. Similarly, the BizTalk standard has provided SOAP extensions for security and guaranteed message delivery.

BEA WebLogic Integration (WLI) is a J2EE technology standards-based solution that facilitates integration with diverse proprietary, legacy, and standards-based applications. WLI is part of the BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform, an application infrastructure that is unified, simplified, and extensible. This framework uses standards-based technologies such as J2EE Connector Architecture (J2CA), Java Messaging Service (JMS), Extensible Markup Language (XML), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Web Services technologies including Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Service Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Discovery, Description, and Integration (UDDI).

BEA WebLogic Integration provides a complete “build to integrate” approach, making Application Integration less challenging. Based on the widely respected application server, BEA WebLogic Integration provides scalability, stability, and standards-based solutions.

As depicted in Figure 33.2, WLI constitutes Business Process Management functionality, an Application Integration framework based on J2EE Connector Architecture, business-to-business integration (B2Bi) for enabling applications from one company to directly work with applications of business partner(s), and data transformation between any data formats such as binary, ASCII, XML, and so on.

Figure 33.2. BEA WebLogic Integration functional areas.

Similar to WLI, the BEA WebLogic Portal (WLP) product is built on the BEA WebLogic Server. Hence, a typical integration solution may use a portal built using WLP as a front end integrated with back-end enterprise systems, complex business processes, and business partners utilizing WLI. The out-of-the-box sample shipped with BEA WebLogic Platform 7.0 illustrates two use cases, one of a business-to-consumer (B2C) portal and the other of a business-to-business (B2B) portal. This sample highlights various integration points of WLP, WLI, and Web services.

The B2C portal is designed for a consumer to buy digital imaging products and accessories. The portal is built using WebLogic Portal’s Webflow/pipeline technology. The consumer can browse the catalog, select items to buy by placing them in a shopping cart, check out, and submit an order to buy. When the consumer places an item in the shopping cart, an inventory check is done to make sure that the order can be fulfilled. This synchronous call is made using WLI AI’s framework (refer to A and B in Figure 33.3). The sample DBMS adapter provided by WLI is used. After the shopping cart is ready, the consumer can submit the order, which causes an XML representation of the order to be pushed to a JMS queue. A BPM workflow is triggered, as shown in C in Figure 33.3. This workflow then uses AI to persist this order to back-end tables, (refer to D and E in Figure 33.3). Besides these integration points, there are two Web services—one for credit card authorization and the other for product evaluation—that use WebLogic’s Java Web Service (JWS) standard.

Figure 33.3. Use of various functional areas of WLI in B2C Portal of end-to-end sample.

The business-to-business portal describes a fictitious company’s intranet site that enables the company’s purchase agent to get quotes from suppliers, send purchase orders, and receive acknowledgments. The purchase agent is presented with inventory information for the products and their respective parts, based on the results retrieved from an inventory back-end system using AI (refer to A and B in Figure 33.4). After reviewing the inventory details, the purchase agent can submit a Query for Price and Availability (QPA). When the purchasing agent submits a QPA through the portlet containing the QPA form, an XML request is generated and placed on a predetermined JMS queue. This action triggers buyers’ workflows, which in turn trigger two supplier workflows (refer to S1 and S2 in Figure 33.4). The response from the supplier’s workflow comes back in the form of aggregated quotes. The purchase agent can now select a quote and send a purchase order request, which again consists of building an XML request and posting it to a predefined JMS queue. A BPM workflow is again triggered, which in turn interacts with the supplier’s workflow (refer to E and F in Figure 33.4).

Figure 33.4. Use of various functional areas of WLI in B2B Portal of end-to-end sample.

WLI is often used to integrate proprietary systems and technologies such as applications running on IBM mainframes and applications using IBM’s MQSeries. BPM workflows can be triggered by XML messages on JMS destinations. They can also be triggered by messages placed on MQSeries by binding MQSeries into the WebLogic JNDI tree using JMS libraries for MQSeries. WLI’s Adapter for MQSeries optimizes the integration with MQSeries with business processes.

Figure 33.5 shows a use case in which a BPM workflow can be triggered by a legacy application placing a message on MQSeries. Technologies from Microsoft also integrate with WLI. WebLogic supports jCOM to interoperate with COM/DCOM applications. It allows the dynamic mapping between the most appropriate Java objects and COM components. It supports both late and early binding of object types and makes the Java events accessible from client tools built on Visual Basic using the standard COM event mechanism.

Figure 33.5. WLI interoperating with MQSeries and .NET.

Services like WLI’s application views can be exposed as Web services to interoperate with applications built on the .NET Framework. In the example shown in Figure 33.5, a custom application places a message on MQSeries. In turn, this message invokes a BPM workflow. This is done using the adapter or by creating and binding the MQSeries connection factory and queue into the JNDI tree and then generating a BPM message-driven bean (MDB). This workflow can then send an acknowledgment by placing an XML message on the same MQSeries (refer to C in Figure 33.5).

Applications built on other platforms like .NET can also interoperate with WLI. An AI service that pulls data from a CRM back end using a J2EE Connector Architecture adapter can be wrapped as a Web service and made to interact with a .NET application, as shown in Figure 33.5.

WLI functional entities like BPM workflows can also be accessed via Web services and call external Web services for integration purposes.

BEA’s Liquid Data Integration (LDI) technology allows users to query disparate data sources using an X-Query standard. As SQL is used to query a relational database, Liquid Data’s X-Query can be used to query data from multiple heterogeneous data sources. Liquid data may be used in conjunction with WLI for integration purposes. In case of BPM, a business operation can be set to execute a Liquid Data Query and return results after querying different data sources. These data sources can be configured via WLI’s application view using J2EE Connector Architecture.

The BEA WebLogic Integration product provides an integration solution that includes Business Process Management (BPM), Application Integration (AI), business-to-business integration (B2Bi), and data integration. Each area addresses a different integration need and can be used in and deployed independently of or in conjunction with one another. The following sections provide brief previews of each functional area. Each one of these areas will be discussed in detail in subsequent chapters.