Abstract In the contemporary world of information technology you find a multitude of applications and systems covering a broad spectrum of areas of need in different companies. One effect of this multitude of programs is the difficulty to make them exchange information with each other or to collaborate, since they are developed by different programming languages for different platforms, with different standards and different data formats. Our aim with this work is to describe how it is possible to tie these programs together to make them actually communicate with each other in order to exchange information, share their native methods and also to become a part of the overall business processes. In this integration task you will, among other things, find different levels of application integration such as data level, method level, application interface level and user interface level integration. Application integration also involves hardware components, called middleware, that facilitate the physical connection between applications.

Abstract In the contemporary world of information technology you find a multitude of applications and systems covering a broad spectrum of areas of need in different companies. One effect of this multitude of programs is the difficulty to make them exchange information with each other or to collaborate, since they are developed by different programming languages for different platforms, with different standards and different data formats. Our aim with this work is to describe how it is possible to tie these programs together to make them actually communicate with each other in order to exchange information, share their native methods and also to become a part of the overall business processes. In this integration task you will, among other things, find different levels of application integration such as data level, method level, application interface level and user interface level integration. Application integration also involves hardware components, called middleware, that facilitate the physical connection between applications. There is a range of different middleware products offered today on the market.

Vid produktutveckling inom industriföretag finns idag luckor vad gäller IT-stöd i arbetets olika faser. Införandet av s.k. RBE-system (Rule Based Engineering) är ett steg på vägen mot att försöka fylla dessa luckor. Meningen med ett RBE-system kan sägas vara att ersätta traditionella konstruktionshandböcker med motsvarande konstruktionsanvisningar i digital form. Detta ger möjligheter till automatisering av processer som är tidskrävande, monotona och ofta förekommande, t.ex.

IT-system i de flesta organisationer består ofta av en stor mängd olika applikationer som är utvecklade under åren med varierad teknik på olika plattformar. Applikationerna kommunicerar med varandra över ett datanätverk, med den information och teknik som passade för ändamålet då de utvecklades. Med allt snabbare förändringstakt ökar behovet av applikationsintegration. För att hantera komplexiteten används i allt större omfattning någon form av Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) som bas för kommunikation mellanapplikationer. Då applikationer ansluts genom ett centralt MOM-system möjliggörs kommunikation som baseras på en-till-många, vilket skapar förutsättningar för en specifik variant som kallas för publish/subscribe.