Fundamentals
The ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks architecture is based on the following set of fundamentals:
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.
ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks supports the most widely used standards for the different aspects of an integration project:
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J2EE Compliant—JMS, EJB, JNDI
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Protocols—Web services (SOAP, WSDL), HTTP, HTTPS
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Messaging—JMS, TIBCO Rendezvous
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Data Description—Native support for DTD, XSD, and TIBCO AE Schema
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Data Representation and Expressions—Native support for XML, XPath
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Data Transformation—XSLT
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 ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks, the process design, deployment, and run-time environment are tightly integrated even though the run-time environment supports a distributed architecture.
Procedure
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At design time, you use TIBCO Designer to configure services, such as adapters, and design your business processes.
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You can use the TIBCO Designer in test mode to debug the process definitions in your integration project.
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You can use TIBCO Administrator to deploy processes to process engines and to deploy adapter services to adapters on the individual machines.
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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.
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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.
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 TIBCO 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.