By integration issues, I’m of course not getting all political on you.

I refer to meshing data – imports, exports and all that.

With the possible exception of collecting cash over the Web (and all the proxies and so on that requires), integration is the issue that, well, is the biggest issue for any tech operation.

And just about anyone runs into this to some degree:

• Merging EDI data (such as payroll) with in-house data (think Excel spread sheets) so reports can be run.
• Third-party data, such as feeds of tax rates, loan rates, recent news stories
• Legacy data (VAX, AS400) to Web-based platforms.

Yeah, I could go on forever.

But it’s always a pain – which is why RSS and XML (especially) has made such a splash (though the adoption rate of both – especially for enterprise apps – is surprisingly low).

So it’s one-off parsers, most written with the parser’s helper: Perl and the Perl DBI.

Amazing stuff.

Someone buy Larry Wall a beer or two…