“How can you demo that?” one of our sales executives exclaimed when I told him I was going to demonstrate our integration technology at a user group meeting. The point being that there is nothing to see – it just happens. And yes, when everything goes smoothly, it “just” happens. However, those of you who have worked with integration know that putting a robust solution in place is everything but trivial.

Let’s for a second compare integrating enterprise systems with the famous Star Trek transporter. You know the one behind the famous quote (sic) “Beam me up, Scotty”. In the Star Trek TV-series and films, every once in a while, people and equipment are transported using this incredible machine. It disassembles matter in one place and magically assembles it back in a completely different place, thus achieving teleportation. Without making too much of the analogy, we can at least see some common characteristics with electronic messaging. I have chosen to focus on three in this post:

• Safe arrival in one piece
• Moving through dodgy matter
• Dealing with contingencies

Arriving in one piece is of course critical for the human beings being teleported. The same is valid for data. We need to deal with the atomic nature of transactions to make sure that we do not commit the sending side before having acknowledged the full receipt at the other end. Store and forward is a useful pattern to make sure that the payload is kept intact (even if the system goes down) until it has been received and acknowledged by the receiver.

One of the things I like about Star Trek is the mysterious and quasi-scientific depiction of phenomena in this fictional universe. Quite often, the explorers face obstacles in the form of force fields and hostile environments. Depending on the physical topology of a system landscape, pesky internet connections and unreliable hardware, your data transfer capabilities could also be in for some rough times. I would make sure my integration infrastructure has some solid automatic re-send capabilities and the ability to reliably send and receive large amounts of data over a WAN.

Having said this, luckily the Star Trek transporter has a store and forward mechanism that allows the transmission to be aborted and bring back the crew to their original state and position. Likewise, in a real-world enterprise integration, we need the capability to track back and analyze what happened, take corrective action and get back at it again. Come back and read more about my thoughts on how to tackle the unexpected in a later post.

Of course there are a lot of other things to consider when building an enterprise integration infrastructure, like:

• Multiple integration protocol capability
• Guaranteed ordering vs. multi-threading
• Asynchronous and synchronous models
• Content-based routing
• Transformation
• Orchestrations

Time and space did not allow for these and other topics to be transposed to the Star Trek universe, maybe some of you readers are more creative than I am?

I welcome all constructive comments, not only those relating to the Star Trek theme of this post!

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