Application Integration: A Detailed Guide

The application-centric integration approach enables connectivity and efficiency across the enterprise.

Application integration is complex yet powerful

Application-centric integration connects a variety of applications and data sources, allowing application and integration architects to juggle multiple protocols and data models, while successfully routing data and handling errors. But before choosing this approach, it’s important to become familiar with the reference architecture to ensure you have the required capabilities for application-centric integration patterns.

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    A guide to application integration

    Understand how application-centric integration differs from data- and event-centric integration, key terms and definitions and best practices for implementing this architecture.

    Application-centric vs. data-centric vs. event-centric integration

    These three approaches differ in the following key ways:

    • The application-centric approach to integration focuses on connecting applications and services, regardless of their architecture.

    • The data-centric approach prioritizes integrating data sources, emphasizing data consistency and accessibility.

    • The event-centric approach uses events as triggers for communication between systems via a reactive architecture.

    Use cases for application integration

    Use cases for the application-centric integration approach include:

    • Data consistency: Ensures that information from different applications and data sources is consistent.

    • Multistep process orchestration: Orchestrates a business outcome by ensuring that multiple applications and systems execute in the correct order.

    • Composite services: Creates new services by combining the capabilities of existing services and data.

    Key application-centric integration technologies

    Familiarize yourself with application-centric integration technologies, such as:

    • API developer portal: A self-service website or user interface to help developers build APIs (application programming interfaces).

    • API gateway: A reverse proxy that controls access to APIs and services, managing and authenticating user traffic.

    • Integration runtime: A runtime solution that connects different applications, services and data formats.

    • Development tools: Software for building integration flows used by an integration runtime.

    • Governance tools: Software for deploying, securing, updating and debugging integration flows.

    • Observability tools: Software for viewing the health of the integration platform, the integration flows and the applications being connected.

    • Message and event brokers: Middleware that receives published messages or events and delivers them to the appropriate recipients.

    Application integration principles and patterns

    Your integration platform should include these principles and patterns:

    • Multiple integration developer experiences: Different integration developer experiences may be needed for different use cases and developer personas.

    • API-first integration: Applications and services should expose their data and functionality via well-defined, consumer-centric published APIs, which help simplify the integration process.

    • Separation of integration and business logic: Integration logic (related to the routing of requests and orchestration of services) and business logic should usually be separate — but don’t apply this principle blindly.

    • Democratized integration: Give developers the power to build self-service and ad hoc integration flows to avoid the bottlenecks and delays that come with a centralized approach.

    Best practices for application integration

    An integration capability matrix helps you choose the right combination of integration platforms and match them to your business personas and use cases.

    API management principles help control, catalog and govern integration interfaces, even for endpoints other than REST APIs.

    Application integration FAQs

    What are the four types of application integration?

    The types of application are:

    1. Presentation-level integration: Combines multiple software applications under a single user interface in a middleware application.

    2. Business process integration: Connects two or more application workflows — for example, automatically generating an invoice when your sales software records a new order.

    3. Data integration: Enables multiple applications to exchange information with each other, such as via a common data format.

    4. Communications-level integration: Combines business process integration and data integration, using APIs to enforce communication standards.

    What are the key features of an application integration runtime?

    When considering an application integration runtime, look for a robust set of connectors that can link a diverse range of application integration technologies, data mapping features for translating between common data formats, identity and access management (IAM) integration so that integration flows can easily connect to different services and propagate user identities, advanced logical capabilities to allow for executing complex multistep processes that include branches and loops, and multiple deployment options, including cloud-based, self-hosted and hybrid to meet the needs of your organization as it evolves.

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