Composite application

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In computing, the term composite application expresses a perspective of software engineering that defines an application built by combining multiple existing functions into a new application. People often compare composite applications to mashups. However, composite applications leverage enterprise and enterprise-ready sources (e.g., existing modules or even enterprise web services) of information, while mashups usually rely on web-based, and often free, sources.

It is wrong to assume that composite applications are by definition part of a service oriented architecture (SOA). One can build composite applications using any technology or architecture.

A composite application consists of functionality drawn from several different sources. The components may be individual selected functions from within other applications, or entire systems whose outputs have been packaged as business functions, modules, or web services.

Composite applications often incorporate orchestration of "local" application logic to control how the composed functions interact with each other to produce the new, derived functionality. For composite applications that are based on SOA, WS-CAF is a Web services standard for composite applications^[1].

Some examples of commercially available tools for composite application development include: