what's integration experience in java context?

A client is looking for integration experience - I have done JMS and web services work in the past, but I am not too su开发者_StackOverflow社区re if that qualifies as integration experience. Pardon my limited knowledge about this field but I don't want to let go on this opportunity. Just in a bit of rush .. So asking it here.. They are also looking for ESB (enterprise service bus) experience.. perhaps that's more related to integration work.. isn't it.

This could mean anything. It might be integration with their legacy, business critical, application that runs on some ancient hardware. It might be integrating with third party web services. It could be anything.

One thing that might help is to know what area of business the client is in. That might give some hints.

Most of the time a job as integrator means you are not working on the code base of a specific product, but on the glue to integrate application togethers.

The glue itself can imply using ESB, message broker, web service, transforming data, scripts to automate job, adapters, ... a lot of possible things.

But the nature of the job is quite different from "pure" development. You don't have the control over everything, you will need to do with applications that exists and make them work together. Whether you would enjoy such a job I don't know, but take some time to think whether you would like this shift or not.