Rest and Enterprise Integration

Rest and Enterprise Integration

An interesting presentation RESTful Approaches To Financial Systems Integration.

First of all it is nice to know that it is not just me that ran into such integration hell in financial systems. 

I've adopt the REST approach in various projects (SILO) lately. Currently the REST APIs  are mostly consumes by UI applications only, which keep the UI nicely decoupled from the back-end. But the real benefit is that the resources exposed can be consumed easily by other systems, even by an Excel spreadsheet :- a revelation from the presentation.

I've also been doing quite a bit of dynamic programming, both on the server (Groovy,  Rhino) and the client side (Java Script). It is very simple to pull resources from the URL and process (render to some visual presentation) on the client. In an enterprise environment, simplicity is going to be a critical factor, because it encourage reuse. Until the developers from different LOB groups stop going about on their own way in accessing/processing the enterprise data, there will be no daylight for the integration hell.

In the presentation, Kirk talked about the flat-file and the database integration approach. Yes, they have been doing it for ages. The same piece of data may appear on 10 tables that belong to different LOB application. Oh, how I wish to replace those with just an URL!