Grids, B2B, B2C, G2C, catalog management:What do you do to integrateenterprises that distrust each other?Border technologies were big business, and persist to today.Websites to act as common marketplaces to consolidate services to a market, or buy and sell stuff, are perhaps the most visible type of this technology.Catalog systems that share a catalog from a manufacturer (or many) to its suppliers are also big business.There is a market for maintenance parts as well, including used parts.Grids, built with XML appliances or whole ESB/EAI systems are a persistand feature that OASIS now recognizes to some extent.I have been involved with a fair bit of this, both between enterprises and related to catalogs and maintenance parts.
XML, ETL and Transformation:Why group these into an integration wave?XML is a means to represent databases with XML query, Xpath and such.EXtended Set Theory (XST) and its XML tools allows you to transform huge XML datasets.XSLT quickly transforms smaller datasets into many formats.ETL is a new name for the tools used to extract/load data from a database in comma delimited, tab delimited, or XML forms.My involvement was first driven by the representation and transfer of database data.XML as a messaging format took longer to interest me (see Web Services below).
Web Sites, Application Servers and Scripting:In the 1990s websites became popular and integrators became involved.I learned ASP, JAVA, and became interested in PhP, Python, Perl, Ruby.I found JAVA to have many limitations, and application servers to be less popular than simply scripting the pages on the Web server.Yahoo, Google and others went this way.I installed and ran trials of several major app servers, but knew they were a dead-end technology.If you disagree I may take your bet.
"If you do anything long enough, you eventually get good at it." MK