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EII as a Filesystem

I've been digging through a lot of technical details on enterprise information integration (EII) products and technologies lately as I prep for some webcasts on the topic. I also spend a fair amount of time on web integration (accessing web-based data, whether in pages, files or APIs) and I turned up Amit Singh's demo of MacFUSE (embedded below).

What I found novel about it is that FUSE and in particular this demo of MacFUse is the exposing of heterogeneous data as files instead of as web services, APIs or database tables. Instead we're talking about making the data (or fragments of data) available to a standard file browser. Not something I would have thought of since this isn't very "enterprisey", a characteristic of most EII tools. The procFS part of the demo below wasn't that interesting because Unix geeks have had this for years, but RSS as a filesystem and Picasa web APIs as a filesystem were both neat to see.

Labels: data integration, EII, FUSE

Posted by Mark Wednesday, January 31, 2007 1:04:00 PM | permalink |

Comments:

It's kind of Enteprisy since large companies love to share interface data via files and they have thousands of file transfer interfaces lying around. Handy if you can replace them with federated data as you decommission old systems.

We are supposed to be thinking SOA for everything these days but you can't forget the massive legacy apps and interfaces that are out there that are not ready for SOA.

# posted by  Anonymous : 3:58 AM

 

What I meant by "enterprisey" was more on the IT systems consumption side than user consumption, since files are a least common denominator interfacing technique most of the time.

It would be nice if there were an easier way to take a legacy API and wrap it into FUSE for file-like access. But then it's no cake walk to wrap a legacy API using EII connector SDKs either.

# posted by  Mark : 6:12 PM

 

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