Sunday, February 3, 2008

What is a Composite Application?

Composite Application is an application that was built using multiple smaller applications and/or components of other systems to source the data and/or business logic. The term composite application is not new and in fact coined in many software engineering texts that were published in 80’s. Yet today the word composite application is referred in the context of Service Oriented Architecture.

Let’s re-look at what the new definition …

Definition:-
“Applications that built using existing reusable services and components that can either source data or do specific task/process. Composite applications are like mashups.”

Unlike a traditional application where the source data is typically stored in a common place such as a database, composite application uses XML messages as the way to communicate between a service/component layers to the application layer.

With more and more vendors support composite application development in their middleware offerings, the support to integrate these services is easier than ever. Even easier to support and maintain as big vendors like Oracle, IBM and BEA supporting industry standards.

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