EAI: concepts and trends

The ever-increasing growth and penetration of Application Integration technologies and market is bringing about significant changes in how Enterprise Information Systems are organized and managed. Moreover, the increasing reliability of tools and techniques stemming from the "Internet revolution" is rendering it ever more convenient to base the development of new applications on this technology, especially because of the great advantages it affords in terms of scalability and distribution. These two principles lead to development of computer systems highly scalable and whose different components should be integrated allowing information exchanges between them. The main technique adopted to achieve this aim is the so-called Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). The present paper deals with the fundamental characteristics and current trends of Application Integration and related technologies and illustrates the problems that need to be tackled in development and management of an integrated and flexible enterprise information system.