Summary

Integration is one of the important objectives sought after through SOA and the SOA Suite. It has been a recurring theme in most of the chapters in this book. This chapter discussed integration, too, although in two new ways. First, we looked at integration at the user interface level.

Instead of programmatic integration at the level of SOA composite applications and the enterprise service bus, we discussed user interface integration. Both client-side integration—for example, with rich user interface widgets leveraging REST-style services—and Portlet-based integration results in a seamlessly integrated user interface based on a services infrastructure that may not be integrated at all. Presentation services can be used to support these integrated user interfaces. Given the special response time requirements from presentation services, we may need to consider services specifically tailored to support application pages. And these services—for this same reason—may well need to be exposed via protocols with less overhead than SOAP.