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Not XML or EAI: Just Direct Connection

By Andrew Binstock

June 15, 2000 — (Page 1 of 2)
The goal of the middleware and EAI industries is indisputably communication between applications. The path chosen by the middleware solution becomes a common river along which data flows. Each application is a tributary of sorts that feeds data into the river. This model also allows the tributary applications to remove from the river data they need or data that was sent to them.

This model suffers from two serious drawbacks. The first is that each connection to the river has to be customized. Apps are customized to attach to the middleware data stream, not the other way around. Installing a middleware package means all the apps that will use it need to be fitted for it.

A much greater limitation is that middleware is by and large constrained to moving data. The accounts payable program can send records and other data items to applications that are interested, but the A/P package cannot drive another application unless both applications were specifically customized to allow one to drive the other. Since driving apps is a rare goal in IT back ends, this problem has gotten little attention.

This will change as the incursion of the Web into the heart of business processes forces companies to raise the quality of customer support. Consider for example an irate customer who calls in to a customer service bureau because his statement is wrong. Under most scenarios, the clerk can apply the missing payment or mark that the billed-for item was actually returned. What the service rep cannot do, however, is anything more than pass along the data.

For example, the rep cannot run the "statements" application for this one customer to see whether the statement will now print correctly. The best the rep can do is to enter the data (which the middleware will pass along) and hope that the statement will be correct on the next cycle. If it's not, it will be up to the customer to call in--more irate than the first time--to seek redress a second time.

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