Chapter 5 Designing the integration Layer Flexible Integration Middleware The DXP concept is to support different middleware integration frameworks, which makes the DXP integration layer flexible so that the data and message are exchanged with multiple systems, irrespective of the technology and framework used in existing systems. Delving into the methodological world of services and integration of services along with to fulfill the integration requirement of EAI (enterprise application integration), ESB was introduced. It was considered as a central hub for integrating services but it is a single point of failure. So, to eliminate this issue, SOA (service oriented architecture) was introduced that, further enhanced with an ESB, has the flexible and distributed capabilities to solve the integration problems by implementing EIP (Enterprise Integration Patterns). Nowadays we are moving toward the microservices that build on lean structure, where services are developed, deployed, scaled, and maintained independently, which further enhances the business requirement, and time to production or market is reduced significantly. EAI vs. SOA vs. ESB vs. Microservices ESB and microservices are models based on SOA. The service-oriented model is an implementation to achieve enterprise application integration. • EAI is a framework that connects and integrates the different application and data source in an organization to simplify the business process. • The EAI framework provides cross-platform and cross-language integration to simplify the business service by exchanging information between the different applications. • SOA is an integration paradigm that is based on design principle of architectural interoperable services, which deals with data sources, software, and message processing. • ESB is a software architecture that provides integration of enterprise applications and services for complex architectures. 165