Websphere Integration Developer(WID)

You are probably wondering what WebSphere Integration Developer is, and why you should care. Companies today face increasing pressure to integrate parts of their enterprise, automate their systems and provide channels for their customers. Companies need products and solutions that are flexible and based on standards.

Some of the problems typically encountered in the integration arena include:

• Synchronizing data among two or more heterogeneous enterprise information systems (EIS).
• Intelligently brokering product requests from consumers to multiple producers.
• Publishing product data to a global repository, thus enabling consumers to access and use the information. Publishing can range from making catalogs of products available, to participating in a global.
• Orchestrating multiple existing business processes using an overarching process.
• Managing order processing from order receipt to both inventory management and supply chain management.
• Assigning, approving, and escalating tasks to effectively deal with customer requests.
• Dynamically responding to changing business conditions by altering the rules and decisions governing the business.

WebSphere Integration Developer tackles these and other types of application integration problems. From the ground up, WebSphere Integration Developer is based on industry standards (notably WSDL, XSD, BPEL, Java™, and UML) and is on the leading edge of evolving standards (the Tuscany Service Component Architecture is a good example). To build applications on these standards you use a set of visual construction tools and higher level concepts, which lets you focus on the business problem, and not have to write masses of J2EE code or be a WSDL rocket scientist. You get the standards without having to eat, sleep, and breathe them.

From a WebSphere Integration Developer perspective, a service-oriented architecture means you can focus on the key components of your system, build them visually, connect them together visually and then be off and running using WebSphere Process Server. Afterwards, you can also visually unit test and debug your entire application or individual parts of it.

WebSphere Integration Developer supports top-down, bottom-up, and meet-in-the-middle construction. You can start at the top--the design level, lay out your overall vision and then gradually drill down and implement the components (services). Alternatively, you can work bottom up, implement the services, and then compose them together into a larger application. More likely, you will find yourself using a meet-in-the-middle approach, perhaps laying out the initial high-level vision, then use the Enterprise Metadata Discovery utility to explore an enterprise information system, and define services that connect to it. You might also want to pull in and reuse an external Web service that one of your business partners has provided.