When I first got the opportunity to work with Tridion, the biggest question I needed an answer to was how to integrate various applications with SDL Tridion.  At the time, I was running a project that required migrating about 20 J2EE applications tightly integrated with a legacy Plumtree Portal to a .NET platform driven by  SDL Tridion. The organization was moving away from J2EE to become a .NET shop, so the apps needed to be rewritten in .NET – our #1 task. All we had was a barebone Tridion installation and a bunch of manuals that did not mention anything about how to integrate apps into it. SDL Tridion training also did not cover this topic – although we got some useful hints, we needed to see a proven design. My intent with this article is to help any new Tridion teams to keep their project moving forward if faced with a similar situation.
The approaches discussed here are not limited to .NET. They can be leveraged to integrate Tridion content into J2EE apps, mobile apps, or anything that you want, such as PHP, Perl, C++. In other words, the sky is the limit.