Designing enterprise solutions with web services and integration patterns

Web services are an ideal implementation platform for integrating disparate legacy systems because they are platform-independent. Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) represent possible design solutions that may be used to construct these enterprise integration solutions. Constructing design solutions with EIP that build on the platform-independence allowed by web services requires that the former be converted into mechanisms that may be implemented with the latter. One such mechanism is conversation models that may be used to implement interactions among web services representing different legacy systems. No methodologies exist that designers can use to construct integration solutions using web services and EIP in this manner. In this paper, we outline such a methodology that generates the design elements in the form of conversation policies for web services.