Non Functional Requirements of Integration Projects (EAI and B2B)

• No Data loss in any case. Data should be recoverable in integration layer.
• Recovery should be automatic in majority of the cases in case of integration layer failure.
• Replay of messages must be possible in all case of failure.
• End systems to be integrated, should be decoupled in time, space and semantic.
• Contingency path/scenarios (if deployment fails or integration is need to be rolled back after successful run in production after a while) must be defined and rehearsed.
• There must be clear separation between Integration and Services.
• Underlying integration service failure (like audit, logging, notification, error handling, etc) must not affect integration as well as enterprise services.
• Audit, error notification, error repository should be deployed on separate servers/infrastructure from business services and integration.

B2B Integration Reference Architecture

With the advent of internet and increasing globalization of business B2B has gained predominance. More over increasing complexities in business processes and sheer increase in inter business transactions is forcing B2B integration in big way. On the technology side, emergence of SOA, BPM and Cloud Computing has changed thought about integration.

Keeping in mind Business and Technological factors, I have developed a B2B Integration architecture which is platform and vendor neutral.



The bottom most Enterprise IT Assets block represents Business & Technical Applications and Services. These IT assets may be in form of packaged solutions or in house developed. These assets consist of in-house hosted solutions as well as ASP or SaaS like solutions. This layer provides information processing and persistence capality to fulfill business needs.

In any typical business organization, two protect IT assets DMZ is implemented using two firewalls. In the proposed Reference B2B Integration architecture, DMZ hosts B2B Gateways Proxy to surrogate real B2B Gateways. Just between B2B Gateway and inner firewall, Entity Management layer resides to resolve identity of incoming requests. On successful entity resolution requests are passed to B2B Gateway layer which is essentially a message transformer.
B2B Gateway passes the message to ESB which with help of Trading Partner Agreement Enforcer passes to appropriate piece of IT asset for processing.

Similarly Outgoing requests are passed to partner from Enterprise IT assets.

Just Started

In this blog I will try to jouney through software architecture mostly independent of tools and technology.

In this blog I will iterate my thoughts on:

1. Enterprise Architecture
2. Enterprise SOA
3. Enterprise BPM
4. EAI - A2A and B2B
5. Application Architecture
6. Application level SOA
7. Application level BPM