Component-based development will play a significant role in integration of Applications. Appropriate components thus need to be developed for standard interface Dr R Srinivasan

As mentioned in my earlier articles, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), like e-Governance, e-Commerce or in general e-Transactions, demand seamless integration of applications from various developers and vendors, developed on different hardware platforms, different languages and different Operating System environments. Dr. Kalakota and Mr. Robinson in their book on "e-Business" say, "Do you know that companies spend billions of dollars on Application Software every year and still do not have the information they need to run their business well? why?. Because they lack integration across Applications". This is where Component-based Development will play a vital role.

At this present moment components that are readily available are for GUI, database access, or support distributed applications; these components are classified as "Infrastructure Components" But in the case of requirement for e-Governance, the applications should be well defined and then appropriate components have to be developed towards a standard interface and these components, which are domain specific, will fall under the category of Business Components. Each Govt. can have a repository of these standard components custom-made with well assigned interface characteristics so that one can choose and "pick and plug" the required ones to develop an Application that would suit distributed environments. Of course this is easily said than done, because distributed Applications/Components require support to locate and identify, manage, connect, transport and provide the necessary services. This calls for the necessity that they should be processed independently. While Applications developed to be interoperable within a department of a Government can be tightly coupled, those which need to interact with the counterparts in another department have necessarily to be loosely coupled, i.e they should have flexible binding resolutions that are executed dynamically according to the environment.

Coming back to the Components, a frequently asked question is whether a component should be developed in binary or any language like Java or C++. From one perspective, you would like to buy components and then simply snap them together into an application. Similarly individuals would like to sell components without exposing the code they wrote to implement the component's interface. Each of these considerations argues for a "binary component". On the other hand, those concerned with developing and using business components within an organization are often concerned more on how the component is implemented. As Dr. Thomas Mowbray, Chairman iCMG says, " It doesn't make much difference how a component developer gets a button to work, as long as it does the obvious things that buttons should do". If the Applications under e-Governance are developed making use of component technology, it is advisable that binary components are deployed to preserve code security. But if language based components are to be deployed, there may be a need for components to be compiled.

The component-based Software Development have already started as a new revolution, particularly in Internet/Intranet oriented transactions and Application integration. There are dozens of different component systems. For example, in the area of Component infrastructure, COM of Microsoft, EJB of Sun and CORBA of OMG are noteworthy ones, for overlapping segments in e-Commerce, EAI, etc. At present majority usage for COM is on the desktop, Java for cross platform applications and CORBA for corporate networks and the Internet. These technologies are mutually interoperable. However, in developing applications in e-Governance, it is preferable that we use the same infrastructure in all applications within a Government. But what will be the scenario in the case of sharing information and interaction between applications of different governments in our country under the umbrella of e-Governance? The problems confronted in the case of Application-to-Application integration in the same State Government will be compounded when applications of different State Governments and the Central Government have to interact, particularly when the applications are different in nature, technologies and standards. One Government will have rarely any say over the specific standards and technologies another chooses to implement. Mike Gilpin of Giga Information Group says, " when you are integrating multiple enterprises in an Internet context, it is necessary for that integration to be loosely coupled. Historically tightly coupled technology was used to build e-Business applications, whether it was COM or CORBA".