Enterprise application integration Access patterns and Lifetime patterns

Access patterns

EAI supports both asynchronous and synchronous access patterns, the former being typical in the mediation case and the latter in the federation case.

Lifetime patterns

An integration operation could be short-lived (e.g., keeping data in sync across two applications could be completed within a second) or long-lived (e.g., one of the steps could involve the EAI system interacting with a human work flow application for approval of a loan that takes hours or days to complete).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_application_integration