Introduction
Companies today are tasked with implementing solutions for many types of integration challenges within the enterprise. Many of these challenges revolve around application integration (between software applications and other systems) and fall into common patterns, such as:
Propagation. Propagation of similar business objects from one system to multiple other systems, for example, an order status change or a product price change.
Synchronization. Synchronization of similar business objects between two or more systems to obtain a single view, for example, real-time synchronization of customer, product registration, product order, and product SKU information among several applications. This is the most common issue requiring an integration solution.
In a one-way synchronization, there is one system (resource) that acts as a data source and one or more resources that are targets of the synchronization.
In a two-way synchronization, every resource is both a potential source and target of a synchronization. There is not a single resource that acts as the primary data resource. A change to any resource should be reflected in all other resources. This is called a two-way synchronization.
Aggregation. Information joined from multiple sources into a common destination system, for example, communicating pharmacy customer records and prescription transactions and website data into a central application and database.
The webMethods product suite provides tools that you can use to design and deploy solutions that address these challenges using a publish-and-subscribe model.