Integration Platforms
The Missing Link in Enterprise Computing
By John Ousterhout
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The most significant challenge in enterprise computing today is integration. The infrastructure of a modern business contains countless applications, devices, protocols, data sources, and frameworks. For an organization to run efficiently, all of its resources must be coordinated, and it must be easy to create new applications that leverage the capabilities of existing resources. Furthermore, a business that incorporates new technologies, such as those for the Web, must be able to integrate them with existing systems.
Unfortunately, many businesses today are struggling with this integration problem. Traditional system programming languages such as C, C++, and Java are poorly suited to the integration task. Approaches such as component frameworks and enterprise application integration (EAI) tools solve only part of the problem. As a result, companies are experiencing high development costs for integration applications. In many cases, the resulting applications are not flexible enough to handle the variety of resources that must be integrated or to evolve rapidly as business needs change.
In this article I'll describe the integration problem in more detail and explain why a new kind of software platform is emerging as the best solution. These integration platforms are based on powerful scripting languages such as Tcl, which stands for Tool Command Language, and can be used in a variety of ways to coordinate all of the resources of an enterprise. Over the next few years, integration platforms will rise to the same level of importance in an enterprise as other key software platforms such as the operating-system platform and the database platform.<>
