Integration that defies EAI convention

EAI versus Enterprise Service Bus

"..the emergence of service-oriented integration has introduced a far more efficient, flexible and low-cost approach. It obviates the need for complex integration adapters and a proprietary messaging hub through the use of web services standards such as SOAP for document recognition; XML standards such as XSLT for transformation; and asynchronous messaging standards such as JMS (Java Message Service). It allows applications to participate in processes without having to be tightly coupled together, enhancing agility and reusability. And it is orders of magnitude faster and cheaper to implement than EAI. "

Though it would be interesting to analyze what is the range of "order of magnitude" advantage we are anticipating with ESB. As the building blocks for integration are increasingly reaching zero cost from the development side, total integration cost will eventually come to match the labor cost involved in actually tying the systems together. Open source apis such as Apache Axis will make the integration projects much cheaper to execute if not that easier.