Adapters Overview
IBM WebSphere Adapters are pre-built software integration components that provide connectivity to Enterprise Information System (EIS), through a configuration only and no coding approach.
WebSphere Adapters are Java components that complies with the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) Connector Architecture (JCA) version 1.5. JCA standardizes the way application components, application servers, and enterprise information systems (EIS), interact with each other.
WebSphere Adapters built further over the JCA to provide a compelling tooling support that enables developers to discover and select EIS resources during design time and generate service interfaces and data models that can be simply, easily and rapidly consumed by business applications. This enables accelerated integration of business applications with backend EIS.
WebSphere Adapters are broadly classified into application and technology adapters. Regardless of how they are classified, adapters exhibit the following characteristics:
- Provide bi-directional connectivity between business applications and EIS
- Run in a managed mode, on an application server, or in a non-managed mode environment, as a stand alone service.
- Connect to business functions, using a service oriented modeling and architecture, and provide a consistent framework to expose external applications. This is achieved by means of isolating a proprietary application interface, or identifying the standards, specific to the application technology.
- Metadata discovery to browse and select required schema definitions and services interfaces. Being metadata driven this enables connectivity to the most current resource definitions on the back EIS.
- Inbound event notifications that can be configured for order and persistence for reliable once and utmost once event delivery
- Transactional support for both inbound and outbound events.
- Globalization support
- Calendar-based scheduling across adapters
- Active-Active HA clustering
The following figures details about how the adapters are integrated with other tooling or runtime to service-enable the legacy applications and also about the inbound and outbound operations performed by the adapters:
Figure 1. Integration of adapters with IBM tooling and runtimes
Figure 2. Adapter Inbound and Outbound integration
WebSphere Technology Adapters, which integrate using file exchange and database records, include:
- WebSphere Adapter for Email - enables the exchange of business objects with a variety of applications
- WebSphere Adapter for Enterprise Content Management - create integrated processes that include the exchange of information with a CMIS server
- WebSphere Adapter for Flat Files - enables the communication with an application through the exchange of text files
- WebSphere Adapter for FTP - extends ESB with business document exchange via FTP server
- WebSphere Adapter for IBM i - enables bi-directional connectivity and exchange of information with IBM i applications
- WebSphere Adapter for JDBC - allows exchange of objects with applications built on any database supported by JDBC Driver
- WebSphere Adapter for Lotus Domino - create modules that can exchange information with the Lotus Domino server
WebSphere Application Adapters, which integrate to Enterprise Application Suites, include:
- WebSphere Adapter for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne - provides bidirectional, real-time integration between JD Edwards Enterprise One and OneWorld Xe
- WebSphere Adapter for Oracle E-Business Suite - supports real-time, bi-directional integration to all Oracle applications modules and other systems
- WebSphere Adapter for PeopleSoft Enterprise - provides bi-directional, real-time integration between PeopleSoft and other applications
- WebSphere Adapter for SAP Software - provides bi-directional, multi-threaded, real-time integration between SAP and other applications, using SAP's all interfaces capabilities
- WebSphere Adapter for Siebel Business Applications - provides comprehensive bi-directional, real-time integration between Siebel and order management, ERP, e-business, and legacy systems
WebSphere Adapter Toolkit enables you to develop custom JCA adapter to meet unique business requirements.
WebSphere Adapters enable connectivity to EIS on various runtime. The adapter tooling and runtime experience is uniform across these different runtimes.
Cross-view of adapters that are supported by different runtimes.
| width="NaN%">Runtime \ Adapter | width="NaN%">SAP | width="NaN%">Siebel | width="NaN%">PeopleSoft | width="NaN%">JDE | width="NaN%">Oracle | width="NaN%">JDBC | width="NaN%">Email | width="NaN%">Flat Files |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WAS | X | X | X | X | X |
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| IBM Business Process Manager | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X
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| WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X
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| WebSphere Message Broker | X | X | X | X |
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| WebSphere Transformation Extender | X | X | X | X |
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| IBM Business Monitor | X | X | X | X | X |
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| WebSphere Business Events | X | X | X | X | X |
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