FLEXIBLE ARCHITECTURE COMPONENT (FAC) FOR EFFICIENT DATA INTEGRATION AND INFORMATION INTERCHANGE USING WEB SERVICES

A flexible architecture component for providing data integration and exchange between a plurality of client applications is disclosed. The client applications are coupled to a network and access respective data sources, wherein the data sources of each of the client applications may be stored in different formats and are not directly accessible by the other client applications. Aspects of the present invention include providing an adapter API that provides a first set of methods for the client applications to use to translate data into XML. Each of the client applications is then modified to invoke the methods in the adapter API to convert data in their respective data sources into XML format and to have the XML formatted data imported into a database on a server, thereby standardizing the data from the data sources. In a further embodiment, a second set of methods is included in the adapter API for the same or different client applications to use that export data from the database into the client applications using standard Web services.