Discovering object definition information in an integrated application environment

An article of manufacture comprising a computer readable storage medium including code for communicating with an integration server and at least one computer system, comprising:

• an object discovery agent (ODA) client in a network computing environment;
• at least one ODA in the network computing environment, wherein each ODA is associated with one application and includes:
• (i) application programming interfaces (APIs) to communicate with the associated application to discover definition information on objects maintained by the application and (ii) code to communicate with the ODA client;
• wherein the ODA client and the at least one ODA include code executed by the at least one computer system to perform operations, the operations comprising:
• communicating, by the ODA client, with one of the at least one ODA to cause the ODA to gather definition information on at least one object used by one application, wherein the ODA client is capable of connecting to a plurality of ODAs, each associated with a different application for obtaining object definition information for the application;
• providing, by the ODA client, gathered object definition information to an integration server to integrate the object in an environment including heterogeneous objects from different applications;
• receiving from the ODA, by the ODA client, information on content types supported by the ODA for providing the definition information;
• requesting from the ODA, by the ODA client, definition information for at least one object used by the associated application in at least one of the supported content types;
• instructing, by the ODA client, the ODA to transfer definition information in at least one supported content type using an on-request transfer method, wherein the on-request transfer method enables the ODA client to determine the order in which object definition information is returned by the ODA;
• and
• generating mappings, by the integration server, from the object definition information for objects used by the applications, wherein each mapping provides an association of information in one application object to a generic object, and wherein the mappings are used to transform information from one source application object to the generic object and then from the generic object to one target application object.