5. EAI and application servers

Application servers (figure 9 ) provide a runtime environment for component-based applications, very often for Web-oriented applications. Services offered include transaction management, object management, connection support, session management, event management, a Java virtual machine, load balancing and fault tolerance. Application servers are becoming an increasingly important part of the enterprise integration infrastructure, for a number of reasons:

• e-business applications often require functionalities not present in existing systems. New code must therefore be integrated. The application server is very often the platform on which the new code is developed;

• application servers enable...