How to integrate two different applications ? Web applications

Question

Hi all i am a Student working on a project in an Hospital we designed an application where patient can book an appointment with doctor similar to this application (apphp.com/php-medical-appointment/examples/sample2/index.php) and our application uses php and mysql and runs on microcms framework now what we are trying to do is to get this application integrated with MedTrak (http://www.intersystems.com/trakcare/) which uses CACHE DB (Intersystems Cache db a post relational db) we have written our application using mysql so is there any possible ways that we can fire data from our application to their db and. get, data from their db So far we have tried these methods odbc will it work cause we have to write our application in ODBC again

Help

Answer 1

Enterprise Application Patterns is a great book and I highly recommend it. However, I would add that even if you had top notch messaging middle-ware available to ensure the 2 applications are as loosely coupled as possible, at some point you will have to read or write to the Cache database, and you will probably need both.

Also, a sophisticated approach to integration may or may not be feasible on a student project. Perhaps it would be sufficient to have most of your code talk to an abstract communication layer that encapsulates the exact integration? You could start with whatever is simplest to implement but could have a story about how it could be changed later. Even this is probably quite hard enough for a student project, since the interface really should assume the communication is asynchronous.

In any case, at some point the rubber will meet the road and you will have to read and/or write to the Cache database. And at that point, ODBC is available, and sounds like it would be a good choice for you. There are other methods to connect to Cache but ODBC is widely used (and therefore probably more reliable) and doesn't require you to learn Cache Object Script, which would be a lot of extra work for your situation.

Answer 2

There are many ways to achieve this - the best way to learn about this is to read "Enterprise Integration Patterns".

I wouldn't recommend writing directly to each other's database - it is a fragile way of gluing apps together, because a change in one schema requires you to change the other app at the exact same time. You have to deal with exotic failure modes - one database may be down for backups, which means you can't write the changes from the other database to it.

Read the book for alternatives!