Application and Component Integration

Although the MERODE approach was initially developed for the development of new intranet-based applications, its concepts also suit the problem of application or component integration very well [45, 46]. Essentially, the event layer leads to an event-driven target architecture. The principles of such architecture can easily be applied to achieve component integration. Components are typically coarser grained than individual business objects and are usually conceived as a black box to the outside world: they may contain multiple business objects but do not publish individual interfaces to each of these individual business objects. Therefore, in a component integration context, event-based interaction will occur at the level of components rather than at the level of individual business objects.