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Architecture

This section explains the TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks architecture at design time and runtime. It discusses these topics:

•	Fundamentals

•	Design-Time Architecture

•	Run-Time Architecture

Fundamentals

The TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks architecture is based on the following set of fundamentals:

•	Support for Standards

•	Integrated Development Environment

•	Extensibility and Scalability

Support for Standards

Your integration platform must support standards for several reasons. A standards-based integration platform supports you best as you add applications to your enterprise or need to communicate with new business partners. Standards are essential as you are planning for the future of the project because standards facilitate updates. Some of the applications you use may already be using standards, and integration development will be faster and easier. Support for standards also removes dependency on one company’s services and makes applications from different companies interact more easily.

TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks supports the most widely used standards for the different aspects of an integration project:

•	J2EE Compliant—JMS, EJB, JNDI

•	Protocols—Web services (SOAP, WSDL), HTTP, HTTPS

•	Messaging—JMS, TIBCO Rendezvous

•	Data Description—Native support for DTD, XSD, and TIBCO AE Schema

•	Data Representation and Expressions—Native support for XML, XPath

•	Data Transformation—XSLT

TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks also supports a plug-in for B2B interactions.

Integrated Development Environment

Your integration project must be supported by an integrated development environment that spans all phases of the project. With TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks, the process design, deployment, and run-time environment are tightly integrated even though the run-time environment supports a distributed architecture.

1.	At design time, you use TIBCO Designer to configure services, such as adapters, and design your business processes.

2.	You can use the TIBCO Designer in test mode to debug the process definitions in your integration project.

3.	You can use TIBCO Administrator to deploy processes to process engines and to deploy adapter services to adapters on the individual machines.

4.	Optionally, you can configure manual activities using TIBCO Designer. When you deploy the project, that information is then used by InConcert. The users authorized to handle the manual activities can be specified in TIBCO Administrator, then exported to TIBCO InConcert.

5.	You can start the processes using the TIBCO Administrator GUI. You can then monitor and manage all processes using TIBCO Administrator.

Extensibility and Scalability

As your enterprise grows, new applications are added and volume of data increases. Scalability to support higher volume and extensibility to support additional applications or a larger number of process engines or adapter instances become paramount.

TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks has been designed to be extensible and scalable. Working in a distributed fashion, you deploy the different adapter services and business processes on different machines in the administration domain. When the business process applications’ volume increases, you add machines to the domain. As you acquire new applications for your enterprise, you install the appropriate adapters into the domain. You configure the adapter, modify your process definition, then deploy the adapter service on the machine of your choice.

Design-Time Architecture

At design time, you work with the TIBCO Designer GUI to configure adapter services and design business processes. You design a business process by dragging activities (e.g. Read File or Send Mail) into the design window and joining the activities using transitions. The TIBCO Designer test mode allows you to debug the business process.

You can provide input, add breakpoints, supply values for variables, and so on. See the TIBCO Designer User’s Guide for more information.

TIBCO Designer Layout

The TIBCO Designer main window has three or four panels that contain the design-time components of an integration project. You can configure the TIBCO Designer GUI to either display the project and palette panels separately or together. The TIBCO Designer GUI is discussed in more detail in the TIBCO Designer User’s Guide.

Figure 6 TIBCO Designer main window

Projects

A project consists of resources that contain the functionality needed for your integration system. This includes services (producers and consumers of information) and any business logic that may be applied to that information.

In TIBCO Designer, you click the project folder to display the project’s resources. The IntegrationProject project, shown in the project tree panel in Figure 7, consists of several components:

•	A JMS shared resource (JMSConnection)

•	Two process definitions (ProcessOrder and ShippingSchedule)

•	A shared resource used by the SOAP activity (HTTPConnection)

•	A Siebel adapter and a PeopleSoft adapter (SBLAccount and PSoft_ReqRep)

•	An Enterprise Archive for the project (ProjectArchive)

For a description of the example scenario that was used as the basis for this project, see Business Integration Scenario.

Figure 7 TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks project and resources

Resources

Resources are the components of a project. A TIBCO Designer resource corresponds to an object in a TIBCO application, such as an FTP activity, a process definition, or a specific adapter instance.

Figure 8 Resources in project tree and design pane

Palettes

Context-sensitive palettes organize resources into related groups. Which palette is displayed depends on the currently opened resource and on your preferences. You drag and drop resources from the palette into the design panel to add them to your project. The main window shown in TIBCO Designer Layout has several palettes in the palette panel.

You can display the palette panel separately from the project panel or together with the project panel. When the palette panel and project panel are combined, a tab named Palettes appears in the project panel that allows you to access the palettes that are currently available. If you wish to display the panels separately, you can modify your viewing preferences on the Edit > Preferences menu.

Enterprise Archive

The Enterprise Archive resource allows you to create an Enterprise Archive file (EAR file) that you can use to deploy the project. The EAR file contains shared archives and process archives that you specify. These archives contain the adapter configurations and process definitions you wish to deploy. After saving the Enterprise Archive file, you can send it to the machine where the administration server resides. TIBCO Administrator can use the EAR file to create a deployment configuration.

See TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks Administration for more information about creating Enterprise Archive files and deploying projects.

Run-Time Architecture

When the integration project is deployed, the different process engines and adapters are ready to run on the machines in the administration domain.

You deploy your project and start each component individually from the TIBCO Administrator GUI. After all adapters and process engines have been started, process instances are created by process starters. A process starter could be, for example, a File Poller or an Adapter Subscriber activity waiting for incoming data. When data arrives, the process starter creates a process instance using the process definition to which it belongs, and the activities in the process are executed in sequence.

In Figure 9, a JMS Queue Receiver activity creates an instance of the process definition to which it belongs each time it receives input.

Figure 9 Process instances created from a process definition

While different process instances are running, any alerts that were scheduled during deployment configuration are sent to the specified recipient by the TIBCO Administration server. In addition, the TIBCO Administrator GUI allows monitoring of the running project at different levels of detail, and can collect tracing information for later analysis.

For the example discussed in this manual, the process engine could perform these tasks:

•	Receive data from an application server via JMS, data from a PeopleSoft Order Management System via the appropriate adapter, and data from a shipping service via SOAP.

•	Enter data into a PeopleSoft Order Management system and data into a Siebel customer service system via the appropriate adapters.

•	Send certain orders out for credit approval and receive approval or refusal.

All components are monitored and managed by way of TIBCO Administrator, which also provides security and repository management. Users can access TIBCO Administrator using the TIBCO Administrator GUI.

Figure 10 Example scenario data flow

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