Approaching Information Access for the Rest of Us…Use the Browser

Truth-be-told, there are a number of limitations to the existing approaches to information access employed by today’s traditional middleware and application development tools. The larger limitation is the fact that most data is unstructured. Therefore, traditional information access techniques are impossible. So, what do you do?

Traditional APIs provide access to internal application behavior and information, but have to be tightly coupled to the core application and thus to the applications that leverage the API. Moreover, APIs are typically closed approaches to information access, and don’t work and play well with other information access methods without a lot of modifications.

Database access methods, such as call level interfaces (CLIs) like ODBC or JDBC, do provide advantages, but are built primarily for structured relational databases, and not unstructured information. Moreover, they are strongly typed, and thus have to change as the database changes, or, in other words, they can’t react automatically to changes in the data without a lot of extra programming.

Other approaches to information access, such as FTP and queuing systems, once again are too strongly typed to work well with unstructured data. The movement of the information is static, and any attempts to alter the information will result in exceptions.

Considering the limitations of traditional interfaces when considering unstructured data, it’s important to look for the least common denominator when considering an information access technique. When considering unstructured information that’s externalized via Web pages, the least common denominator is the browser, or Web Integration. While most don’t like to consider the browser as a point of access for their SOAs, given the fact that most information exists behind browser interfaces these days, you may not have a choice. Moreover, the technology is well tested and works well.

Web Integration is the process of leveraging the informational and functional resources of the Web in an application of your choice. There are a number of compelling reasons why such an approach is preferred:

• The first and most obvious is the sheer quantity of resources that are available through the browsers, such as blogs, catalog data, even enterprise applications. This data is typically valuable and not structured for consumption by other systems. When using the Web Integration approach, the user interface is your machine interface.
• Second, the Web Integration approach allows you to take advantage of existing enterprise information systems (EIS) that provide Web interfaces. Most traditional enterprise systems provide a browser-based interface, and thus are accessible when using Web Integration, no matter if they have an API or other information access mechanism, or not.

The potential here is big. Not only providing your SOA with access to structured information you paid big bucks to create, but unstructured and valuable information others paid to create…that’s just cool.