The Enterprise Application Integration Framework In A Distributed And Heterogeneous Environment

At the dawn of network era, especially the rapid development of the Internet, the running model of current enterprises has changed dramatically, which focuses on how to acquire and handle information more quickly than their competitors, so that they are able to occupy a suppress position in market. Therefore, it becomes an inevitable trend for enterprises to proceed the information process as quickly as they can.During the enterprises' information process, they have developed or bought various application systems, which are developed by different vendors at different stages and based on different platforms, as well as for different purposes and departments. These application systems have become isolated information islands for the lack of information sharing. In order to implement information process throughout whole enterprises, we need a powerful mechanism, and a scalable uniform framework to integrate these information islands. That is to say, we need enterprise application integration.It's an emergent requirement for the China Post to develop an information exchange platform system named "The national Post information exchange platform system". In this paper, an unified enterprise application integration framework has been proposed based on several key technologies such as middleware and universal data representation. This framework is composed of message broker and application adapter. The message broker supports messaging, message routing translation and transformation of message and message filtering, as well as hides the differences among hardware platforms, database, message format and communication protocols based on ORB middleware technology; The application adapter acts as a role of a bridge between EAI framework and connected EIS systems, so that the EIS systems can be integrated in the framework easily with simple configuration through interacting with each other in a standard way.This EAI framework has been proved effectively in the project of "The national Post information exchange platform system". It is proved that, this application integration framework facilitates the development of enterprise application systems and provides building enterprise application integration platform with important technological support.