B2B Application Integration: e-Business-Enable Your Enterprise (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Making business applications communicate across corporate boundaries can be complicated, which is why system architects usually coordinate such projects. B2B Application Integration explains some of the approaches these system architects can take to get application A to talk to database B and Web site C, without simultaneously allowing hacker yahoos in for a look around. David Linthicum surveys technologies generally, and also the products that implement them. He's a fine teacher, able to clarify complicated processes with words and illustrations. He's also well informed enough to express and support opinions on how various technologies are limited, which products live up to their claims, and how to implement specific mechanisms for application integration.

In a typical section on an application integration technology, the book introduces terms and explains the relationships among the pieces of the technology. Block diagrams and flow charts show which pieces talk to which others. Where appropriate, competing technologies are explained side by side--for example, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Extensible Markup Language (XML). There's very little code included, other than the barest examples for illustrative purposes. This is a book for architects and planners, not implementers. As such, it's an excellent survey of software integration technologies. --David Wall

Topics covered:

• Tools for making different applications and database management systems speak to one another, within and across corporate borders
• Various approaches to the integration problem (data integration, business process integration, and so on)
• Middleware
• Remote procedure calls (RPC)
• Message queuing
• Extensible Markup Language (XML)
• RosettaNet
• Microsoft BizTalk
• Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)

Product Description

(Pearson Education) A guide to the concepts, technologies, and techniques that make e-Business work, offering a thorough explanation of how middleware layers work. Includes in-depth coverage of the five types of B2B applications, and how to evaluate them for a particular organization. Softcover. DLC: Application software--Development.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (December 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201709368
• ISBN-13: 978-0201709360
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,325,558 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Smorgasbord of EAI/B2B technologies, January 7, 2001

By	Cees van Barneveldt (Grand Rapids, MI United States) - See all my reviews

This book presents a smorgasbord of technologies applicable to the B2B domain. These technologies are described very clearly and at the right level for system architects.

The structure of this book is similar to Linthicum's previous book on EAI. Also much of the content overlaps with that book, with new chapters on typical B2B Application Integration standards as XML, BizTalk, RosettaNet. This is both a strength and a weakness I suppose. A strength because a lot of typical EAI technologies also apply to B2B. A weakness because the book is something in between a second edition of a previous book and a really new book.

I was missing a chapter about EDI. EDI is historically one of the most important B2B technologies and by far not dead yet. Despite its shortcomings there are still EDI implementations going on (often as part of ERP implementations, ask the system integrators such as AtosOrigin).

This book also pays minimal attention to front-end B2B technologies with only one chapter about portals with a tiny paragraph about digital exhanges. I would rather have read more about e-marketplaces, and integrations via Ariba/CommerceOne. Also I would like to read more about other front-end and Web technologies as CGI, JSP and servlets, ASP / ISAPI / IIS, control brokers + implications of front-end integrations on back end integrations.

Two of the appendixes deal with integrations with COTS software: the ERP packages SAP and PeopleSoft. It would have been nice if there were also appendices on integrations with the other important ERP packages as Baan, Oracle and JDEdwards, a CRM vendor as Siebel, and SCM vendors as i2 and Manugistics.

The structure of this book is very technology oriented and many technologies are presented very well. However, now you have to consult your customer on which technology to choose, and which EAI/B2B vendor to select. Why do I choose for a portal, or RPC and distributed objects and not for a message broker? And if I choose a message broker, how do I select the right product from the right vendor? How do I formulate my requirements and selection criteria? The book is not very clear on these topics, and it would have been nice if there were chapters on a)relation between business strategy and B2B technology b)selection of B2B technologies and products.

Overall, a good and readable book, but there is always information you want to read that is not covered in this book.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Need this Book if You're Moving to B2B, December 20, 2000

By A Customer

As the other reviewer stated, this book is really the second edition of the EAI book by the same author. However, there is enough new content in this book, focused on B2B, that make it well worth the price. For instance, how XML, XSLT and BizTalk function in the world of application integration. Also, which technology to leverage depending on the situation. I found the way the author links EAI and B2B application integration approaches and technology particularly useful, and cleared up a lot of issues for me. I would recommend this book to anyone working on EAI or B2B projects, like me. If you already own the EAI book, this book should be next on your list to read.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complete, pragmatic and a top reference for architects, June 16, 2001

By	Mike Tarrani "www.tarrani.com" (Deltona, FL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This book provides a pragmatic approach to B2B integration by focusing on integrating existing systems instead of addressing a "clean slate" approach to the task.

Part I consists of a single chapter that defines B2B application integration, and how to leverage your existing assets and make a sound business case to bring this about. It also provides a quick overview of the key role middleware plays and emphasizes the fact that a truly integrated suite of applications needs to have a built-in mechanism for synchronizing and responding to business events. This is a key point to the approach and differentiates integrated applications from a collection of systems that have been kludged together to communicate with one another.

Chapter 1 also gives a classification of five different approaches to application integration. This is followed in Part II with a chapter about each approach. The value here is twofold: (1) the approaches can be viewed as design patterns (with some effort because each approach is presented in a slightly different way), and (2) techniques such as SEI's architecture trade-off analysis method (ATAM) can be applied from a technical perspective to select the best approach for a specific environment. Part III is devoted to the technology that an architect will have at his or her disposal to apply to the integration. Starting with an introduction to middleware in chapter 7, this part of the book ends at chapter 13 after thoroughly covering the strengths and weaknesses of each middleware model and associated components. What impressed me the most about this part of the book is the matter-of-fact, unbiased discussion. The author used products for examples, but did not favor any particular one, which is a refreshing change from some books on the topic that read like vendor literature.

Integration standards are covered in Part IV, with the same unbiased approach used in the preceding part, and with the same frank discussions of strengths and weaknesses. Key standards (both De Facto and De Jure) are covered, including XML, RosettaNet's methods, BizTalk and XSLT. The part of the book also devotes a chapter to understanding supply chain integration and ends with a final chapter titled B2B Application Integration Moving Forward. This final chapter is packed with advice and things to consider, such as moving from EDI to XML, discussions on security, performance and stability, etc.

Mr. Linthicum has done a thorough job of covering the complex issues associated with transforming existing systems into an integrated suite of applications that will support B2B. I like the way he has structured the book, which allows an architect to derive design patterns as well as perform formal trade-off analysis at the technical level for both the architecture and the building blocks with which to build the architecture - or rather, to transform an existing architecture into one that fully supports B2B. This book should be on the desk of every system architect and gets a solid five stars.