Systematic Reuse Recipe #1 – Minimize Point to Point Integrations

Problem Statement

A consuming application/business process wants to integrate with your reusable asset. However, the consumer doesn’t want to take your standard message – wanting a specific format that will make it easier for them. Why? Could be because of several reasons: lack of time/money/skills or technical limitations (e.g. their system can handle only delimited files and cannot parse XML).

Suggested Approach

The immediate, tactical (and often tempting) solution would be to just format the data per the consumer’s format and integrate in a point-to-point fashion. Don’t settle for this option too quickly! Prefer to publish a standard publication in that is in line with your long-term direction (e.g. offer reusable message publications in XML format indicating changes to critical data entities or state changes in business processes). Create a subscriber that tranforms the standard message to the consumer-specific format.

Rationale

If point to point integrations go ungoverned, you will end up with a rat’s nest of tightly coupled integrations that ultimately hurt business agility.Your long-term intent is to have multiple consumers (web applications, backend systems, business processes, etc.) consume reusable message publications.If several business processes need the same core data or notifications about state changes, why would you want to integrate with them separately? Publications will not only reduce integration effort, they place less strain on your system resources – publish once and subscribe several times. No need to query databases or invoke external systems every time there is a new integration.

Note: The additional transformation logic will require extra logging/error handling but over the long haul is a better option than going for a point-to-point integration approach.

This will enable the asset provider, to integrate new applications faster (no need to custom develop messages and integration code for every new consumer) and reduce the cost of maintenance. Reducing application to application coupling is a key motivation for pursuing this approach as well.

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