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Unit 6: Source Integration

Portals have become so common and so much has been written about them that we will cover just notes
the basic concepts here. The important point to remember in the context of application integration
is that portals have become the primary mechanism by which we accomplish application
integration. Whether that is good, bad, or indifferent doesn’t really matter. It is simply the way
it is. Trading partners have extended the reach of internal enterprise systems by utilizing the
familiar web browser interface.

poai by example

An example of POAI is an automobile parts supplier that would like to begin selling parts to
retail stores (B2B) using a portal. This portal would allow the retail stores to access catalog
information, place orders, and track orders over the web, currently the parts supplier leverages
SAP as its preferred inventory control system and a common built mainframe application written
in COBOL/DB2 serves as its sales order system. Information from each system is required for the
B2B portal, and the portal users to update those back-end systems as well.
In order to create a portal, the parts supplier must design the portal application, including the
user interface and application behavior, as well as determine which information contained within
the back-end systems (SAP and the mainframe) needs to be shared with the portal application.
The portal application requires a traditional analysis and design life cycle and a local database.
This portal application must be able to control user interaction, capturing and processing errors
and controlling the transaction from the user interface all the way to the back-end systems.

Although you can employ many types of enabling technologies when creating portals, most
portals are built using application servers. Application servers provide the interface development
environments for designing the user interface, a programming environment to define application
behavior, and back-end connectors to move information in and out of back-end systems,
including SAP and mainframe systems. Although not integrating the application directly the
portal externalizes the information to the trading partner in this case, the owner of a retail auto
parts store and also update the back-end system, in this case with order placed by the store owner
perhaps with the status of existing orders.
Other examples of portals include entire enterprise that are integrated with a single portal
application. As many as a dozen companies may use that portal, B2B to purchase goods and
services from many companies at the same time. The same type of architecture and enabling
technology applies in this case, however, the number of systems integrated with the portal
application greatly increases.

portal power

The use of portals to integrate enterprises has many advantages. The primary one is that there
is no need to integrate back-end systems directly between companies or within enterprises,
which eliminates the associated cost or risk. What’s more you usually don’t have to worry
about circumventing firewalls or application-to-application security, because portals typically
do nothing more than web-enable existing systems from a single enterprise. With portals, you
simple connect to each back-end system through a point of integration and externalize the
information into a common user interface. Of course portals themselves are applications and
must be designed, built, and tested like any other enterprise application.
Portal-oriented B2B application integration also provides a good facility for Web-enabling
existing enterprise systems for any purpose, including B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C)
selling over the Web. If you need to move information to a user interface for any reason, this is
the best approach.

In many B2B application integration problem domains, the users prefer to interact with the
back-end systems through a user interface rather than have the systems automatically exchange

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