Meta Group believes the application server and integration (EAI) markets are destined to converge over the next couple of years around products which provide a layer of core application services. In its view the lack of integration services in application server toolkits makes it more difficult to build integration enabled applications. Users will require better integration services in order to link applications and to reuse and analyze business logic and data. Currently these forms of middleware are packaged discreetly. Application servers provide services including execution, presentation, and integrity necessary for building applications. Message brokers and other integration servers offer gateway, formatting, event routing and other services for integrating applications. Our research indicates overlap. Application servers bundling loosely coupled, event-driven mechanisms; integration servers providing transactional and request/response interactions) is already occurring. It is therefore advising users not to build integration logic into specific applications and to choose application server toolkits with the best integration features.
