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Article Excerpt
In Part I of this article (XML-J, Vol. 4, issue 6), we introduced the enterprise information integration (EII) problem and explained how the XML query language XQuery and related technologies--specifically XML, XML Schema, and Web services--are central to enabling this age-old problem to be successfully addressed at last.
We provided a technical overview of the XQuery language and presented a simple "single view of Customer" example to illustrate XQuery's role in the EII domain. The example was based on an electronics retailer that wanted to share customer information across three portals--portals for customer self-service, credit approval, and product service. The information to be integrated resided in a variety of back-end information sources, including two relational database management systems, an SAP system, and a Web service.
In this article, our XQuery/EII saga continues. In this installment, we look at how EII relates to two other technologies designed for integration tasks, namely enterprise application integration (EAI) and extract-transform-load (ETL) tools. We also take a brief look at BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic, an XQuery-based EII offering, and discuss how XQuery and Liquid Data were put to use recently in a telecommunications-related customer project.
What About EAI?
Given the industry buzz around EAI today a natural question about EII is "so why bother?" That is, why isn't a modern EAI solution alone--for example, a workflow engine with XML-based data transformation capabilities--sufficient to solve the EII problem? The answer is, in principle, that EAI is in fact sufficient to solve the EII problem. A developer could always choose to hand-build a set of workflows, writing one workflow per application-level "query" to deliver the desired information back to the calling applications. In the example from Part I of this article, three hand-tailored workflows could instead be written to provide information retrieval capabilities comparable to our...
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