Design Time

At design time, an integration developer designs the integration-relevant aspects of a business application at an abstract level, independent from any implementation-relevant details.

The following aspects of a business process can already be specified at design time:

• The process flow and its separation into individual process components (or application components)

  More information: Process Models

• The interfaces that determine the data exchange between process components and the detailed structure of the data - of the messages - that is being exchanged

  More information: Interface Objects

• The mapping or transformation of data structures on both sides of a connection

  More information: Mapping Objects

The following figure gives an overview of these entities. On the left side it shows a complete integration scenario spanning a huge set of process components and connections; on the right side, the details of one single connection between two process components are shown:

Figure 1: Integration-Relevant Aspects of a Business Process that can be Specified Already at Design Time