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Oracle® Application Server Adapter Concepts Guide
10g Release 2 (10.1.2) B14058-04 |
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Oracle® Application Server Adapter Concepts Guide
10g Release 2 (10.1.2) B14058-04 |
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With the growing need for business process optimization, efficient integration with existing back-end applications has become the key to success. To optimize business processes, you can integrate applications by using Oracle Application Server adapters. Adapters support a robust, light-weight, highly scalable, and standard-based integration framework, which enables disparate applications to communicate with each other. For example, adapters enable you to integrate packaged applications, legacy applications, databases, and Web services. Using adapters, you can ensure interoperability by integrating applications that are heterogeneous, provided by different vendors, based on different technologies, and run on different platforms.
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Note: Adapters support local transactions in this release and do not participate in global transactions. This document addresses the integration of adapters with OC4J, Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) Process Manager, and OracleAS Integration InterConnect. |
This chapter contains the following topics:
Oracle Application Server adapters provide the following benefits:
Provide a connectivity platform for integrating complex business processes: Adapters integrate mainframe and legacy applications with enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), databases, and messaging systems. Oracle provides more than 200 adapters to connect various packaged applications, such as SAP and Siebel, and databases. In addition, adapters integrate middleware messaging systems such as MQSeries and Oracle Advanced Queuing, and legacy applications, such as Tuxedo, to provide a complete solution.
Support open standards: Adapters are based on a set of standards such as J2EE Connector Architecture (J2CA), Extensible Markup Language (XML), Web service Invocation Framework (WSIF), Web service Inspection Language (WSIL), and Web service Definition Language (WSDL). The support for standards reduces the learning curve of a user and eliminates the dependency of users on a single vendor.
Implement a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): The support for open standards enables adapters to implement an SOA, which facilitates loose coupling, flexibility, and extensibility.
Use native APIs: Adapters support multiple ways of interfacing with the back-end system and provide various deployment options. Using native APIs, adapters communicate with the back-end application and also translate the native data to standard XML, which is provided to the client.
Model data: Adapters convert native APIs to standard XML and back based on the adapter metadata configured during design time. Adapter configurations are defined during design time that are used by run-time components.
Facilitate real-time and bidirectional connectivity: Adapters offer bidirectional communication with various back-end systems. This includes sending requests to back-end systems and receiving a response. Adapters also support the real-time event notification service. This service notifies about the back-end events associated with successful back-end transactions for creating, deleting, and updating back-end data. This two-way connectivity ensures faster, flexible, efficient integration, and reduces the cost of integration.
Maximize availability: Adapters are based on J2CA 1.5 specification and deployed in the Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE (OC4J), which is the J2CA container of Oracle Application Server. Adapters can, therefore, fully leverage the scalability and high availability of the underlying Oracle Application Server platform. In addition, adapters can be deployed on the JBoss and Weblogic platform.
Provide easy-to-use design-time tools: Adapters use design-time tools that provide a graphical user interface (GUI) to configure and administer adapters for fast implementation and deployment. In addition, the tools let you to browse, download, and configure back-end schemas.
Support seamless integration with Oracle Application Server components: Adapters integrate with various Oracle Application Server components, such as Oracle Application Server Portal, and BPEL Process Manager, and J2EE applications, such as Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), servlets, and Java applications.
There are three types of Oracle Application Server adapters: technology, packaged application, and legacy. Figure 1-1 illustrates the different types of adapters.
Figure 1-1 Types of Oracle Application Server Adapters
This section describes the following types of adapters:
Technology adapters integrate Oracle Application Server with transport protocols, data stores, and messaging middleware. These adapters include OracleAS Adapter for FTP, OracleAS Adapter for JMS, OracleAS Adapter for Database, OracleAS Adapter for Advanced Queuing, and OracleAS Adapter for Files. Technology adapters are currently available with the BPEL Process Manager installation.
Packaged-application adapters integrate Oracle Application Server with various packaged applications, such as SAP and Siebel. These adapters include OracleAS Adapter for Oracle Applications, OracleAS Adapter for PeopleSoft, OracleAS Adapter for SAP R/3, OracleAS Adapter for Siebel, and OracleAS Adapter for J.D. Edwards. Packaged-application adapters are available as part of the OracleAS Adapters CD.
Legacy adapters integrate Oracle Application Server with legacy and mainframe applications. These adapters include OracleAS Adapter for Tuxedo, OracleAS Adapter for CICS, OracleAS Adapter for VSAM, OracleAS Adapter for IMS/TM, and OracleAS Adapter for IMS/DB. Legacy adapters are available as part of the OracleAS Adapters CD.
Adapters provide the following types of services to facilitate communication between applications:
Adapters support the synchronous request-response service. The adapters receive requests from adapter clients, translate these requests into the native back-end data format, and call the appropriate method in the back-end application. In addition, the request-response service retrieves the back-end response to the Adapter Framework component after performing reverse translation. In J2CA terminology, this type of service is also known as outbound interaction.
The request-response service can be used to create, delete, update, and query back-end data as well as to call back-end workflows and transactions. For example, an OC4J application client can use OracleAS Adapter for SAP to create a customer within the SAP application.
Figure 1-2 illustrates the request-response service.
Adapters support the event-notification service, which is an asynchronous communication paradigm. In J2CA terminology, this type of service is also known as inbound interaction.
Adapters either listen or poll for back-end event changes. When listening for events, an adapter registers as a listener for the back-end application that is configured to push events to the adapter. The adapter can also poll the back-end application, which is usually a database or file, for the events required by the client application.
The event-notification service can be used to keep a track of back-end events associated with successful back-end transactions for creating, deleting, and updating back-end data.
Figure 1-3 illustrates the event-notification service.
The adapter metadata definition stores information about the back-end connection and schemas for business objects and services. Adapters consist of a design-time component for browsing and storing metadata and a run-time component for running services. The adapter metadata definitions are generated as XML Schema Definition (XSD) and WSDL files. Figure 1-4 illustrates the metadata interaction.
