Glossary
A
ActiveEnterprise
One of the three product families from TIBCO Software Inc. The other two are ActivePortal™ and ActiveExchange™ (see www.tibco.com for details).
Activity
An activity is a specific task in a business process definition. Examples are sending e-mail, writing a file, sending information to an SAP adapter, querying a database. In TIBCO Designer, each activity is represented by a resource and can be added to the process definition from its palette. See also Process Definition.
Adapter
Adapters make it possible to communicate and update business information that originates from diverse sources and resides on diverse host systems within an organization. ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks adapters interact with enterprise applications such as PeopleSoft, SAP R/3, OracleApps and Siebel, as well as databases or files.
TIBCO Administration Domain
Consists of a set of machines on which TIBCO software components are deployed, a set of deployed projects, and a single database for authentication and authorization.
When you install ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks, you specify a TIBCO Administration Domain. The domain initially contains one or more machines. Later, the domain contains the services and process engines running on those machines. Multiple projects can be in the same domain. You can monitor the components of all deployed projects in a domain from the TIBCO Administrator console.
C
Condition
A condition can be used to control the flow of activities in a process diagram. Conditions are specified on transitions to determine whether to take the transition to the next activity or not. Condition types include: always, XPath which allows you to specify a custom condition using an XPath expression, and otherwise.
Configuration Panel
In TIBCO Designer, the configuration panel allows you to fill in values for the fields in the objects of your project, and to perform mapping.
CRM
Customer Relationship Management system. One of the applications in your enterprise.
D
Deployment
During the deployment phase of your integration project, you assign the various project components (process and services) to the physical locations where they will run for test or production purpose. For example, after production deployment, the adapter service instances, and other process instances will be distributed across the production platform.
Design panel
In TIBCO Designer, you drag resources from the palette panel into the design panel to create instances of that resource for your business process definition.
DTD
Document Type Definition. A non-XML schema file that contains a formal description of the vocabulary and structure of the elements in an associated XML file. DTDs serve the same function as XML schema documents (XSDs). A DTD may also provide some content information. The DTD for an XML document is the combination of the internal and external subsets described by the document type declaration.
E
Endpoint
An endpoint exposes the service to other applications and services. An endpoint is analogous to a port in a WSDL file. Multiple endpoints for each service can be created so that operations within the implementation of the service can be invoked in more than one way.
G
Activity Group
A grouping of activities in a process definition. Some groups specify process control logic.
I
Interface
An interface describes the operations available within a service. The interface is analogous to a portType in a WSDL file. Each interface can contain multiple operations.
M
Machine
A computer on which TIBCO Software components are installed. Each machine may belong to only one TIBCO Administration Domain.
P
Palette
A TIBCO Designer palette is a collection of resources that you can use to populate your project. For example, use an adapter palette to add an adapter and a publisher to a project.
Partner
Partners are other services that your process or service can invoke. Partners are defined by a name and a WSDL portType that describes the operations that can be invoked.
Partner Link Configuration
Partner Link Configuration resources associate partners with endpoints by specifying the actual bindings to endpoints.
Process definition
Specifies the business process flow using activities. A process definition is just a special type of activity; you can therefore use a process definition as an activity.
Process instance
Running instance of a process definition
Process starter
Starts a process based on an external event, e.g. arrival of a file or a message from an adapter.
Project
A ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks project is a collection of all the components of your EAI solution. This includes components like business processes, adapter services, machines, engine instance(s). You create and save projects using TIBCO Designer and later deploy the project.
Project tree panel
One of the panels in TIBCO Designer. The project tree shows a hierarchy of all objects (adapters, activities, etc.) in your project.
R
Resource
In TIBCO Designer, resources are the objects you can drag and drop into the design panel.
S
Service
A ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks service retrieves, generates, and processes business data in a decoupled yet reliable manner. The business process receives data from a service and sends data to a service. Associated with a service is a service interface, transport, data syntax, and data schema.
SOAP
Simple Object Access Protocol. SOAP is a lightweight protocol for the exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It is an XML based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined datatypes, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses. (See http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/)
T
Tab
A related set of entities and functions that are visible when you select one tab in the TIBCO Administrator GUI. As components are installed, additional tabs become available.
TIBCO Administrator
TIBCO Administrator is a browser-based interface for monitoring and managing TIBCO deployments, their security, and TIBCO administration domains. TIBCO Administrator organizes the information using tabs.
TIBCO Designer
A GUI tool that allows you design your integration project. You use TIBCO Designer for adapter configuration, process design, and deployment.
Transition
Transitions indicate the flow of processing. In TIBCO Designer, a transition is represented by an arrow between activities. Each activity in a process definition must have a transition to it, or the activity is not executed when the process executes.
W
WSDL Web Services Definition Language.
WSDL is an XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information. The operations and messages are described abstractly, and then bound to a concrete network protocol and message format to define an endpoint. Related concrete endpoints are combined into abstract endpoints (services). (See http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl)
X
XPath
XPath is a scripting language developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for addressing parts of XML documents. It provides basic manipulation functions for strings, numbers and Booleans. TIBCO Designer uses XPath as the language for defining conditions and transformations. A complete description of XPath is available at http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath.
XSD
XML Schema Definition. An XSD file defines the structure and elements in a related XML file. The suffix of an XSD document is .xsd.
XSLT
XML Stylesheet Language Transformation. XSL Transformations (XSLT) is a standard way to describe how to transform (change) the structure of an XML (Extensible Markup Language) document into an XML document with a different structure. XSLT is a recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium