Flexible reuse of middleware infrastructures in heterogeneous IT environments

Middleware systems and adapters integrate remote systems and provide uniform access to them. Middleware infrastructures consist of different types of middleware systems, e.g. application servers or federated database systems, and different types of adapters, e.g. J2EE connectors or SQL wrappers. Different adapter technologies are incompatible to each other, which requires to write new adapters where existing ones should be reused instead. Therefore, we introduce a virtualization tier that allows to uniformly handle and access adapters of different middleware platforms and that reuses existing adapter deployments, which avoids redundant administration tasks. Moreover, the virtualization tier can also reuse complete middleware infrastructures such that adapter deployments and adapter execution remains in the respective middleware system. This allows to flexibly reuse middleware infrastructures and facilitates the realization of new integration scenarios at reduced expense.