Towards a fault-tolerant architecture for enterprise application integration solutions

Abstract

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solutions rely on process support systems to implement exogenous message workflows whereby one can devise and deploy a process that helps keep a number of applications' data in synchrony or develop new functionality on top of them. EAI solutions are prone to failures due to the fact that they are highly distributed and combine stand-alone applications with specific-purpose integration processes. The literature provides two execution models for workflows, namely, synchronous and asynchronous. In this paper, we report on an architecture that addresses the problem of endowing the asynchronous model with fault-tolerance capabilities, which is a problem for which the literature does not provide a conclusion. © Springer-Verlag 2009.