Information technologies for interoperability

Information systems largely involve networking these days. The development of complex business applications is now focused on an assembly of components available on a local area network or on the net. These components must be localized and identified in terms of available services and communication protocol before any request. This article presents the most common technologies that allow heterogeneous and distributed software systems to collaborate. The first part of the article introduces the base concepts of components and middleware while the following sections describe the different up-to-date models of communication and interaction and their use in industrial applications. To finish, the last section shows how different models can themselves communicate.