Chapter 15. Business Connectivity Services

When it comes to building business applications, one thing has become universally true: no application is an island. Every organization, no matter what its size, uses more than one tool to manage data. The big challenge in software engineering today is the unification of these disparate business systems to provide a consolidated platform for managing an organization.

Of course, each of the many possible solutions to this problem has its own strengths and weaknesses. However, no matter which set of tools and technologies you use, ultimately, the answer is a mash-up—a consolidation of various components and data to create a new application to serve a particular function.