Web Integration is the process of leveraging the informational and functional resources of the Web in an application of your choice.

There are a number of compelling reasons why such an approach would be interesting. The first and most obvious is the sheer quantity of resources. Second, the Web integration approach allows you to take advantage of existing enterprise information systems (EIS) that provide Web interfaces.

The challenges in implementing such a solution from scratch should also be obvious. The resources are there, but they are notoriously heterogeneous, and are often dispersed among several pages. Another complication is the language in which the resources are available — Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The very thing that has contributed to its success (its loose and forgiving syntax) makes it very difficult to impose structure on HTML. Add to this the complexity of client-side JavaScript, user validation and session handling, and the solution becomes non-trivial.