Viaduct enables Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and facilitates an SOA by exposing legacy systems as reusable services. Applications can be integrated together in and across enterprises and business agility can be improved by quickly enabling and supporting changes in business practices by enabling new interactions between systems.

Viaduct comprises three primary components:

Viaduct Studio - the tools for designing, developing, testing and deploying Viaduct Processes.

Viaduct Runtime - the container into which Viaduct Processes are deployed for execution.

Viaduct Management - a web sconsole that allows support staff to administer, manage and monitor both Viaduct runtimes and their deployed Viaduct Processes.

Viaduct Processes are a primary component in Viaduct; a process is a workflow definition of the steps necessary for an integration use-case. The process when executed (by data arriving and triggering an event) will implement the logic of the process which usually involves the parsing, conversion, transformation, manipulation of data either passed to the process or obtained by the process interacting with external resources, systems or applications.

Enable your SOA with Integrated Services
One of the most often purported benefits of implementing an SOA is to solve the 'Integration Issue' for the enterprise. In fact, most of the work left for developers to actually do when implementing an SOA is to implement components that provide the business logic for integration which are then exposed as services. With Viaduct, this 'extra' work is made redundant as a Viaduct process takes on the hard work of integration via a high level, graphical toolset that enables the developer to focus on the actual integration scenario with no need to write any code. Once a process is developed, it can easily be exposed to an existing SOA or exposed as a Web Service for external access.

Process Oriented Integration
Viaduct implements a process oriented approach to integration, this is accomplished by the user designing an integration process using high level graphical design tools which embody all of the necessary logic for the integration. The process is a workflow for the runtime engine to follow, which supports all of the necessary activities for integrating applications, components and services. Processes are deployed into runtime containers that can be installed on virtually any operating system in many form factors. The processes can be managed remotely and allow the concept of 'Integration at the edges' (where the integration process is physically deployed into a location close to the system being integrated).

Graphical Process Design
Viaduct Processes are designed using a typical drag and drop diagramming style. Activities include Message definitions, Transformations, Connections, Iterations, Rules and all of the features expected to support integration. Processes are designed using a model driven development (MDA) approach where the process (a UML model) is then bound to a physical model of the runtime environment and then deployed. This enables a single process to be easily deployed to multiple runtimes in a single go - even if the runtimes expect different process configurations.

Distributed Process Environment
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is typically undertaken via a hub and spoke model, where the integration engine sits in the center of a set of inbound and outbound feeds. This obviously exposes the potential for a single point of failure and is a single contention point when traffic flow increases. Viaduct, however, allows runtimes to be distributed across a network into many different locations. Each runtime can also support multiple processes implementing many different integration scenarios. Processes as well as runtimes can run independently or can cooperate in coordinated macro processes ensuring no single point of failure and dynamic traffic rerouting where required.

Multiple Supported Protocols
Connectivity is divided into inbound connections (Listeners) and outbound connections (Connectors) - both can actually support one-way and request-reply. A process owns Connectors where Listeners are external to a process. Supported protocols include - TCP, File, HTTP(S), WebServices, FTP(S), Email (SMTP, POP3 and IMAP), HL7, Database, JMS, Process to Process and many others.

Users can implement additional protocols either with a User Service that enables a very quickly configured connection or a user built OSGi Service.

High performance transformation services
The most often used services in an integration toolset are the data transformation components. Viaduct includes a high performance and extremely flexible transformation and mapping environment. Mapping is accomplished via the Viaduct Map Language (VML). VML is a high level language designed purely for data transformation and fully supports any mapping use-case including simple one to one mapping to very complex conditional repeating transformations. All is enabled in a graphical map editor that supports a drag and drop-editing environment for ease of use and rapid map development.

Separation of Parsing and Mapping
Viaduct supports a unique mechanism for parsing, serializing and dealing with data formats. A Viaduct process can support data in any form from Binary data to XML. Domain specific data formats are usually dealt with by parsers built specifically for that format, Viaduct however takes a different approach - a single model is defined for each format (typically via an importer or a wizard) and all of the rules necessary for parsing and serializing that data is contained in this model. The model is stored as an XML document and can be easily copied and reused by many different processes.

The internal content model of the data, once it has been parsed, is an SDO (a Service Data Object) and it is this that is used by the transformation services, enabling a format independent mapping environment.

The benefit of the approach is that data parsing is only done once when a Listener obtains data, and from that point on, the data is in a consistent format that can be manipulated as required by the process. Once the data is required to be serialized, the same model can be used therefore reducing the amount of effort required to define parsers and serializers.

Highly scalable runtime (PDA to Mainframe)
Viaduct Runtimes leverage the Eclipse Equinox OSGi runtime and can support many Operating Systems including Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, HP-UX and others. Different form factors such as small footprint devices and Mainframes ensure that Viaduct processes can be supported on virtually any environment required. Runtime configuration can also be customized to enable only those services and components necessary to be installed on a target system ensuring an optimized runtime environment for processes.