Structural Data Binding for Agile Changeability in Distributed Application Integration

Abstract

The interaction of distributed applications raises an integration problem that consists in how to satisfy the minimum interoperability requirements while reducing coupling as much as possible. Current integration technologies, such as Web Services and RESTful APIs, solve the interoperability problem but usually entail more coupling than required by the interacting applications. This is caused by sharing data schemas between applications, even if not all features of those schemas are actually exercised. This has its toll in application development agility. This chapter proposes compliance and conformance as the concepts to minimize coupling without impairing interoperability by sharing only the subset of the features of the data schema that are actually used. In addition, data binding between messages and the receiver's schema is done structurally in a universal and application-independent way. This eliminates the need for application-specific stubs and allows clients to use any server with which they comply and servers to replace any server to which they conform.