Adapters are responsible for making information from different applications available to other applications across an enterprise. To do so, an adapter is configured to provide one or more of the following services:
An adapter publication service recognizes when business events happen in a vendor application, and asynchronously sends out the event data in realtime to interested systems in the TIBCO environment.
For example, an adapter can publish an event each time a new customer account is added to an application. Other applications that receive the event can then update their records just as the original application did.
An adapter subscription service asynchronously performs an action—such as updating business objects or invoking native APIs—on a vendor application. The adapter service listens to external business events, which trigger the appropriate action.
Referring to the previous example, an adapter subscription service can listen for customer record creation events (happening in an application and published to the TIBCO infrastructure) and update another application.
In addition to asynchronously publishing and subscribing to events, an adapter can be used for synchronously retrieving data from or executing transactions within a vendor application. After the action is performed in the vendor application, the adapter service sends a response back to the requester with either the results of the action or a confirmation that the action occurred. This entire process is called
request-response, and it is useful for actions such as adding or deleting business objects.
An adapter request-response invocation service is similar to the request-response service, except that the roles are reversed. The vendor application is now the requester or initiator of the service, instead of the provider of the service. The adapter service acts as a proxy, giving the vendor application the ability to invoke synchronously functionality on an external system.
For example, the adapter sending a request message from application Y to application X. After it processes the message, it is returned to the adapter, which sends the response back to application Y.
