A DOMAIN-SPECIFIC LANGUAGE TO DESIGN ENTERPRISE APPLICATION INTEGRATION SOLUTIONS

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solutions cope with two kinds of problems within software ecosystems, namely: keeping a number of application's data in synchrony or creating new functionality on top of them. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provides the technology required to implement a variety of EAI solutions at sensible costs, but they are still far from negligible. It is not surprising then that many authors are working on proposals to endow them with domain-specific tools to help software engineers reduce integration costs. In this article, we introduce a proposal called Guaraná. Its key features are as follows: it provides explicit support to devise EAI solutions using enterprise integration patterns by means of a graphical model; its DSL enables software engineers to have not only the view of a process, but also a view of the whole set of processes of which an EAI solution is composed; both processes and tasks can have multiple inputs and multiple outputs; and, finally, its runtime system provides a task-based execution model that is usually more efficient than the process-based execution models in current use. We have also implemented a graphical editor for our DSL and a set of scripts to transform our models into Java code ready to be compiled and executed. To set up a solution from this code, a software engineer only needs to configure a number of adapters to communicate with the applications being integrated.