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An enterprise environment invariably includes enterprise information systems other than relational database systems:
Currently, there is no standard architecture for integration of a J2EE server with enterprise information systems; most enterprise information system vendors and J2EE Server Providers use vendor-specific architectures to support enterprise information system integration. For example, a J2EE Server Provider can specialize its container to support integration with an enterprise resource planning system.
A major disadvantage of developing enterprise information system integration applications for deployment on specialized containers is that application components become tied to mechanisms and programming models defined by the specialized container. As a result, such components are not portable across different types of containers.
The J2EE Connector architecture (described in Section 6.10) is a standard architecture for the integration of J2EE products and applications with heterogeneous enterprise information systems. This architecture is currently under development and will be part of the next version of the J2EE platform. In this document, we make no specific recommendations based on the Connector architecture.
In the interim, an Application Component Provider can use vendor-specific architectures to integrate with enterprise information systems. However, while developing various types of application components we suggest following the guidelines that are discussed in the subsequent sections in this chapter in order to ensure that the migration path to the Connector architecture will be smooth.