A Pattern Taxonomy for Business Process Integration Oriented Application Integration

Application Integration is a work and cost intensive part of both, software development projects and ongoing software maintenance. Thus, software vendors as well as application owners need mechanisms to cope with the complexity of this task. Due to its inherent feature of decoupling applications in a robust manner, message-oriented integration techniques have gained much attention among different integration styles for a long time. Message oriented integration patterns have been analyzed in much detail as well. Recently, higher-level styles that provide an abstraction closer to application issues are under discussion. Because of its high abstraction level providing a global view, business-process-integration based application integration is a promising candidate to start with. This paper presents a refined approach of Business Process Integration Oriented Application Orientation (BPIOAI). It facilitates the task of application integration by means of defining standard integration processes based on a taxonomy of integration patterns and a set of integration services. The identified taxonomy takes the structure induced by the integration processes into account. It provides a standardization that is especially suitable for centralizing the application integration development in central development centers of large organizations. Besides these benefits, this work provides an approach toward a domain-specific language for the domain of application integration.