Adapter Key terms

The following key terms are used when describing adapter interactions in this manual.

•	A palette is a standalone adapter component that contains the screens used to gather input at design-time when configuring an adapter with a service. The palette is accessed via TIBCO Designer.

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A project is a collection of all configured adapter resources. A project contains configuration information for one or more adapter instances. A local project is typically used at design-time for testing adapter instances. For production, a project is typically managed by an administration server provided by the TIBCO Administrator for the standalone adapter and TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator for the adapter service engine.

•	An .ear of an application contains global variables with values set at design-time by the standalone adapter. The global variables can be changed at deployment at the application level, service level, or service instance level.

•	Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a software architecture in which applications and data are decomposed into discrete, operationally independent services, which can be executed in a highly distributed manner.

•	A business object is the representation of the data model of the entities that the adapter service engine connects to. The business objects are downloaded during also the design phase and are used by the adapter services.

•	A container is an ActiveMatrix runtime entity that hosts component implementations and service bindings.

•	A service assembly is an ActiveMatrix deployment package. It contains service units and a descriptor that indicates the container into which each service unit is to be deployed. The suffix of a service assembly file is .saf.

•	The ActiveMatrix services are described in documents expressed in Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The WSDL documents specify the messages that are required to access a service.

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During any service interaction, each service will adopt one of two roles: provider or consumer. A service provider publishes a WSDL document that describes the services it offers. A service consumer uses the WSDL document to determine the available services and the messages required to access the services. A message exchange pattern (MEP) defines the sequence and cardinality of messages sent between the provider and the consumer.