Integration: Scenario

Paul Stovell

Paul Stovell

— 1 min read
This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.

This is the first in a short series on application integration.

Imagine a small business, with an online e-commerce Web Store. The store lets customers browse and purchase products. It is built using ASP.NET MVC, and the data lives in a SQL Server database. Over the years, the store has gathered information on thousands of customers and their purchasing history.

The marketing team decides they need a small application to help them run marketing campaigns. Since marketing groups are very creative, they call the application Marketing. The ASP.NET developers who built the original site are busy, so they hire a small Ruby on Rails shop to build the application for them.

While the marketing application will have its own domain model, it will need to source customer information from the e-commerce application. In other words, integration is needed.

How do we allow these two applications to share data?

What are the approaches at your disposal for solving this problem?

So far we've looked at:

  1. Shared Database
  2. Extract/transform/load
  3. Web Services
  4. Messaging

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