Integration services

An integration service is a specialized application with a defined interface and structure that acts as a container for a web services solution.

You can integrate applications by using a service-oriented architecture (SOA). In an SOA, a service is often defined as a logical representation of a repeatable activity that has a specified outcome. Typically, a service is self-contained and its implementation is hidden from its consumers. To facilitate their reuse, services define a prescribed interface, which specifies how data is exchanged with the service.

In IBM® Integration Bus, an integration service is a specialized application with a defined interface that acts as a container for a web services solution:
  • It contains message flows to implement the specified web service operations.
  • The interface is defined through a WSDL file.
You can create an integration service by using any of the following methods:

Like an application, an integration service can reference resources in shared libraries. The shared library is deployed before or with the integration service. If you update the resources in the shared library and redploy it, those changes are immediately available to the deployed integration service.

When you implement an integration service, you can deploy it to an integration server. You can start and stop the deployed service as you would an application. A web service consumer can interrogate the deployed service to return its interface.

Interfaces

An interface consists of one or more operations and a binding style.

An operation is a description of an action that is implemented by the service. Each operation can have either of the following types:
  • Request-response type operations mean that a request is sent and a response returned to the interface.
  • One-way type operations mean that only a request is sent, and no response is needed.

Each operation in the interface defines the data that can be passed in the form of inputs to and outputs from the component when the operation is called. A one-way operation has only an input. A request-response operation has both an input and output. Each operation can have one or more faults defined to handle error conditions.

The binding style specifies the protocol and data format of the operation.

For information about how to develop a service interface, see the following topics:

Integration service API

You can generate a JavaScript client API from an existing integration service. The JavaScript client API provides operation functions that you can call from a program that is running in a JavaScript environment. For more information about the integration service API, see Integration service JavaScript client API.