Digitalization, which now encompasses virtually every aspect of business operations, leads to the emergence of multiple independent software solutions, each supporting different — yet interrelated — areas of an organization’s business processes. As a result, the need arises to share or transfer information between applications, which often differ in terms of both underlying technologies and data logic.
While such data exchange can be handled manually — by entering or updating information across multiple systems — this approach is highly inefficient, costly, and prone to errors. Therefore, it becomes essential to implement automated communication interfaces that execute defined integration scenarios.
Basic Interface Types
Real-Time Interface
The operation of this type of interface is an integral part of a single transactional activity (e.g., updating customer data) performed in the source system, which requires immediate communication with the target system. This communication may involve a simple transfer of information or support more complex scenarios such as distributed transactions. From a business perspective, the most important feature of real-time interfaces is the continuous preservation of data consistency between all involved systems.
Batch Interface
A batch interface works by transferring a larger — sometimes very large — volume of data as part of a single execution, which is triggered either automatically at fixed intervals, after certain conditions are met, or on demand. This type of interface is used when periodic data updates do not disrupt business processes, or as a compromise in situations where real-time integration is not technically feasible.
Typical Interface Tasks
Update
Data entered or modified in the source system is propagated to other systems, most commonly using real-time interfaces.
Synchronization
This task requires simultaneous access to data across all systems involved in the synchronization. Data consistency is checked, and any discrepancies are corrected by updating the relevant records.
Replication
This refers to regularly creating a copy of a dataset — or a selected subset — from the source system for use by other applications, for example in analytics, reporting, or — when paired with appropriate indexing — as a foundation for advanced search mechanisms.
Conversion, Transformation, and Aggregation
A fundamental role of any interface is to adapt source system data to a format acceptable by the target system. In simple cases, this may only require converting data types or notation. However, when transferring more complex structures, a deeper restructuring of the data — i.e., transformation — is often necessary. A specific case of transformation is aggregation, which involves combining data from one or more sources using operations such as counting, summing, averaging, and similar.
Integration Platform
An enterprise IT infrastructure typically consists of numerous distinct systems that require mutual communication. This leads to the creation of many dedicated interfaces, whose independent maintenance becomes increasingly difficult — especially when their functional scopes begin to overlap. The optimal solution in such cases is the implementation of a centralized integration platform that handles as many interfaces as possible — ideally all of them. This approach creates a synergistic effect, significantly increasing the efficiency and reliability of the integration layer while reducing maintenance costs. This improvement is driven by the use of unified, shared mechanisms for monitoring and dependency control, shared hardware resources, and other components such as business logic, data replicas, indexes, and preconverted or preaggregated datasets. An integral part of the integration platform is also a user interface, allowing for the configuration of processing parameters applied within the business logic, or even batch loading of data to be used later by other systems.
Key Aspects of Integration Layer Maintenance
Monitoring
Having up-to-date insight into the current status of interface operations, their performance, last execution, and — most importantly — any issues that may arise, is a critical factor in ensuring the effectiveness of the integration layer. This responsibility lies with the monitoring module, which clearly presents the current state of the environment, manages activity logs, and distributes notifications about key events to predefined recipient lists. This enables even proactive actions aimed at preventing failures or resolving them quickly.
Definitive Status and Dependency Control
Business logic or processing optimizations within the integration platform often create dependencies between individual interface tasks. This means that the execution of one task may depend on the outcome of another previously executed task. Each task must be designed in such a way that it can always provide a clear status of its result (none, outdated, current), enabling the automated synchronization system to avoid conflict scenarios — for example, starting a task based on outdated input data or deleting data while it is still being processed by a dependent task.
Diagnostics
During interface operation — whether standalone or as part of the integration platform — failures can occur. These are most often caused by infrastructure issues, but may also result from improper behavior of either the source or target system. In such cases, the key requirement is the ability to quickly diagnose the problem’s origin, resolve it, or notify the responsible party. To support this, we apply a logging strategy that captures detailed logs at each processing stage, including diagnostic information such as the contents of HTTP-level requests and responses when applicable.
Post-Failure Recovery
The logic and implementation of the interface should take into account the ability to automatically restore its consistent state after any type of failure — without the need for complex data analysis or manual restoration of consistency. This is essential for minimizing system downtime, which could otherwise seriously disrupt business processes.
Technology
The essence of interface development lies in connecting different systems, which may be either technologically compatible or completely heterogeneous. This factor — along with business requirements and the nature of the data being transferred (e.g., volume) — determines the choice of interface technology. Our experience covers a wide range of popular and less common technologies, selected according to the specific characteristics of each use case.
Oracle Database Environments
When integrating two systems based on Oracle® databases, the natural choice is to use database links (DB Links) built into the Oracle environment. This is a highly efficient solution that allows for relatively simple creation of any type of interface — from straightforward data transfers to advanced logic scenarios involving transactional operations or complex joins, analysis, and aggregation of data from two or more sources using optimized SQL queries and DML commands.
Java Environments
Integration between Java-based systems offers a variety of dedicated solutions implementing the standardized JMS (Java Message Service) interface. We have successfully used queue-based implementations (e.g., HornetQ). Another — though now less commonly used — option is EJB-based interfaces (Enterprise JavaBeans), which, while not recommended for new projects, still offer an effective way to integrate with existing legacy system implementations.
Heterogeneous Environments
The absence of native mechanisms for a particular technology does not limit integration capabilities. In fact, we often deliberately avoid native mechanisms — even when available — in favor of more widely adopted, well-understood, and technology-independent solutions.
Flat Files – This approach involves generating files in simple formats such as CSV (Comma-Separated Values) and transferring them to the target system via widely used protocols like FTP/SFTP. It is effective for older systems (e.g., AS400) and for transferring large data volumes in batch mode.
Web Services – These interfaces, built on web technologies such as HTTP and enhanced with specific protocols or conventions, are commonly implemented using REST (Representational State Transfer), which combines HTTP with JSON or XML formats. In corporate environments, for compatibility with existing systems and legacy infrastructure, we also often implement SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) interfaces.
Direct API Access – Many technology platforms (e.g., Oracle databases) allow the invocation of functions and procedures exposed via an API (Application Programming Interface). Vendors typically provide client libraries or drivers available for many mainstream technologies (e.g., JDBC, ODBC, Node.js). Although less flexible, this solution avoids the need to set up additional components such as a web server to expose a network service.