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<title>Abstract</title>
<para>In complex IT environments it is necessary to integrate different information systems with each other, exchange data between tools and automate actions and function calls depending on events arising from user interaction. To meet the requirements of integration building usually means to implement APIs and to create tool-to-tool bridges. Web Services can help to clean up bridges into interfaces as well as to abstract functions from their underlying platform and implementation.</para>
<para>These are the major goals of the loosely coupled integration strategy which is in turn one essential idea of a service-oriented architecture (SOA).</para>
<para>&brs; provide a low level set of functions and web services. These can be orchestrated into services and used in business processes which make up the execution part of a SOA environment.</para>
<para>&brs; is an add-on to XBridgeNG 2.0. It runs standalone or in combination with XBridgeNG. Pure XBridgeNG has two components:</para>
<para><itemizedlist>
        <listitem>
            <para>XML Schema for item based data types (e.g. tickets from a bug tracker system or a database record)</para>
        </listitem>
        <listitem>
            <para>Set of Apache Ant tasks to function as a bridge between the XBridgeNG XML format at legacy 3rd party software (e.g. HP Quality Center, Serena TeamTrack, ...)</para>
        </listitem>
        <listitem>
            <para>The &brs; add
            Web Services (SOAP) wrapper around Apache Ant tasks (since XBridgeNG 2.0)</para>
        </listitem>
    </itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>The current focus is on file-based operations. &brs; do not contain an integration server or a process execution engine.</para>
