As we tread deeper into the buzzword-infested waters of Web 2.0, we often hear terms that sound vaguely tech-related and desirable but we have no idea what they actually mean. One of these words is integration. There has been an industry-wide increase in web service integration as of late, making this the ideal time to jump on the boat.

By the time you are done reading this article, my aim is to help you understand what integration is, how it works, and why you should want it.

What is integration?

The term integration when used in the context of web applications is usually referring to the act of establishing a relationship between one application and another. The most widely used protocol for this kind of relationship is SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). This protocol is based on its spiritual predecessor, XML-RPC (XML Remote Procedure Call), which uses the same kind of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) connection that your favorite web browser makes to Google.com (for example) to send data back and forth.

SOAP was intentionally designed like this to enable it to bypass corporate firewall restrictions by fooling the corporate firewalls into thinking that it’s just web traffic. This is one of the main reasons that the protocol has become an industry standard today. SOAP messages are specified in XML (Extensible Markup Language) and contain both the data itself and information about how the data is structured (metadata).

How does it work?

The basic premise behind integration is that applications provide services. For example, Google offers web search services, Flickr offers photo sharing services, and Facebook offers social networking services.

The way we normally access these services is to get on the website and instruct the application what to do by clicking a bunch of buttons and/or filling out form fields. But did you know that the website you see is just a façade? It’s not the application itself. Rather it is an interface to the application, a visual representation of your interaction with the application.

The application doesn’t care whether it’s getting instructions from a website visitor or from another application. All that it cares about is getting instructions that it can understand so that it can provide the services that it offers.

That sounds great, but how does that help me?

Have you ever wondered if it’s possible to automate at least some of the interactions that you have with other web applications? Well I have news for you, the answer is most likely yes. To give a real example, there is a client of ours who has a weekly newsletter. Their weekly newsletter is templated so all that he has to do is fill in the content. He grabs the content manually from another source and copy/pastes it into the email creative. However, there is a lot of content. This process takes him about an hour.

With the power of web services, this client can now automate the entire process so that all he has to do is glance over the final email before sending it out. That’s a fairly significant gain in productivity, reducing a 1 hour task to a 1 minute task.

So how do you know what kind of things you can automate this way? To answer this question, think about the things you do daily that are tedious and repetitive. Most likely, an application could be doing those things for you. Do you have a bi-weekly subscriber list upload, a weekly opt-out report, or something similar? These are all examples of things that can be automated using web services.

One thing to note with doing this kind of integration is that it requires a small amount of work from your tech team. They will need some information about the web services that the target application offers. Typically they need the API (Application Programming Interface) documentation and information about the security method employed(if any) for the application. Usually, secure SOAP transactions employ TLS (Transport Layer Security) and some kind of credentials in the SOAP message itself.

For the Publicaster API documentation, click here.

This article has only scratched the surface of what integration and service-oriented architecture are capable of. We predict that this trend will continue to grow and allow us to build web applications that are seamlessly interconnected and provide us with feature-rich content and services.

We’d like to hear people’s perspectives and viewpoints on the issue. Contact us with any questions or to share your thoughts.

Tags: API, integration, SOA, SOAP, web 2.0, web services, XML

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Best Practice, General - Misc., Industry Trends, Publicaster, Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.