In the exercises for this chapter, we will ask you to revisit your analysis of the application scenarios in exercises for chapter 6 to:

Refine your explanationn of the technical capabilities required for integration technology to be used on the project.

To determine what appears to be the best technology or combination of technology to use,

We emphasize the word appears because determining the best integration technology to use is complex for the following reasons.

1. There are often tradeoffs in choosing one technology over another. Product A may offer benefit X but have drawback Y, while product B offers benefit Y1 but has drawback X1. In other cases, further reaserch is typically needed. With this research it is sometimes possible to chose a superior technical solution. In other cases, it comes down to whether the company wants to make a great short-term invetment to save money in the long term, or spend less now and more later.

2. For the purpose of discussion, software productivity products are classified as to the types of applications that they have been used to implement and their architectural features even though products within the same classification can vary significantly. For example, EII products can exhibit performance problems when they have to consolidate large amounts of data from non-relational data sources. Yet the EII product Composite has sophisticated internal runtime logic to address these issues.

3. Products-and product classes-acquire new capabiities over time and since the time that this book was published, new capabilities might have become standard for a particular type of product. In short, there are no easy answers, and products continue to evolve. Nevertheless, drafting your answers in light of what has been presented in the book gives you valuable experience with the process of this type of analysis.

The scenarios from Chapter 6 are repeated here for your convenience:

Part A

A manufacturer of medical equipment has acquired a competitor. Each organization uses its own materials resource planning (MRP) application, one of which runs on a mainframe and was written internally in COBOL using flat files; the other uses an MRP application from Oracle running in a UNIX client server environment. Management decided to consolidate both applications using a client-server based MRP module from SAP.

Part B

In order to receive Homeland Security funds from the federal government, state healthcare agencies need to provide weekly updates regarding reported cases of infectious diseases to the Centers for Disease Control. In addition, they need to provide an alert within 24 hours of learning of an incidence of any one of a list of particular infections (e.g., bubonic plague). To obtain this information, the state agency, whose own system is based on a COBOL IMS system, must collect information from clinics and hospitals throughout the state, which use a variety of packaged and internally developed applications for tracking patient information.

Part C

An insurance company offering property and casualty coverage (e.g., car and home insurance) wants to build a web browser based means of allowing its customers to file claims and/or check on the status of claims. The PPC application for the company is based on a COBOL IMS system.

Part D

A large manufacturer of engines has grown by acquisition and has five data centers in various locations supporting different manufacturing sites throughout the world. Although all five centers are using the same MRP application, at the current time they have no means of exchanging information about inventory levels. Audits have indicated that the company is losing over a million dollars a year ordering parts from vendors that they could have more cheaply exchanged between sites, so it wants to implement an application that will allow the timely and efficient exchange of inventory between plants.