In-Depth

Data Junction Unveils EAI Development Environment

Integration Architect builds upon Data Junction’s ETL expertise

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 02/18/2003

Data Junction has historically marketed extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) tools that move data in and out of a variety of different data repositories. Integration Architect is the company’s first full-blown enterprise application integration (EAI) offering.

Largely as a result of its demonstrated ability to facilitate an exchange of data between almost any conceivable data repository, ETL has emerged as a potentially exciting EAI technology. In light of its ETL pedigree, company representatives suggest that Data Junction is positioned to deliver on the promise of an integrated development environment—i.e., Integration Architect—that enables programmers to link disparate applications together in real-time.

Integration Architect consolidates or enhances several of Data Junction’s existing tools, including Integration Process Designer, a tool for building event-driven message flows; Integration Map Designer, a data mapping and transformation analysis tool; and Explorer, which provides a facility for viewing integration processes.

Integration Architect also bundles Adapter Schema Designer, a tool that provides a visual interface for designing record layouts of source and target data; Document Schema Designer, a Java-based facility that can create structures from schema standards such as EDI, HIPAA, iDocs and others; and Extract Schema Designer, a tool that automates the coding of scripts for the integration of e-mail, report data, HTML or other raw text.

Integration Architect also features a data browser—dubbed GoPeep!—that allows developers to view files or URLs in terms of their record and field formats.

Data Junction proposes to marry its integration toolset with an XML-based meta data repository. Integration Architect also boasts compliance with Web services standards, according to the company, enabling developers to more easily integrate applications that have already been exposed as Web services.

In tandem with its Integration Architect release, Data Junction also took the wraps off of an updated version of its Integration Engine that it says is more suitable for real-time environments. The new Integration Engine boasts a server-less architecture, along with what Data Junction says is a reduced resource footprint The Integration Engine runs as a daemon on Unix systems and as a service on Windows boxes. It will also be available as an integration broker, as a JCA service, and as an SNMP agent, Data Junction indicates.

In addition, companies can embed Integration Engine in their products and leverage hooks into Integration Architect’s XML-based data repository.

The EAI space is a crowded one, populated with vendors such as WebMethods Inc., Tibco Software Inc. and Vitria Technology Inc. That said, Mike Schiff, a senior analyst with consultancy Current Analysis Inc., believes that Data Junction’s new EAI offering is priced to challenge many of these competitors in the mid-market.

In a research report for Current Analysis, Schiff wrote: “Data Junction has been flying under the radar in the integration space for awhile, but now has a consolidated and enhanced offering for integration. The price and feature set match the mid-market, which is ill-served by current products.”