Application Integration by Meme Media Concepts

This paper makes a bridging between two rather new fields of research in IT, the Meme Media (MM) and the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). It describes the main principles of an unique application extension which allows connections between different applications with mutual interactions. The interaction bases on selected Meme Media technologies and on Web techniques. Meme Media ideas are used for a very simple and easily usable kind of connections. Every user should be able to connect applications and to organize some interactions between them. Like in the Meme Media systems, a slot stands for a special import and export parameter of the application. Connections are always connections between two single slots of two applications. A larger composite bases on such pairs of directly connected applications. There is a propagation concept for interactions through the whole composite. It is said that Meme Media Objects always live in a biotope. The biotope may be a runtime system or some background applications managing the composition and the interaction. The described extension is implemented in a special system, called WIP (Web Based Integration Pads). WIP is rather more a standard for a connection interface for applications than a system. For the integration of applications, the applications should not be embedded in such an additional biotope. All preparations for connections and all interactions should be managed locally, inside the applications themselves. A connection only means the mutual authorization for interacting. The research was sponsored by the German Ministry of Economics and Labour in the Project IPWIAS, (FKZ: KF 641701KLF3, 2003-2005). 1 Aspects of the Enterprise Application Integration At first, software programs were designed to run independently, without any interactions between them. In enterprises, more and more tasks have been transferred to software applications. The consequence was a conglomerate of different and not interacting applications depending on the special type of the enterprise. Such a system of applications cannot work effectively.