Adapter Features


This section provides a brief overview of the adapter’s features. These are discussed in detail later in the manual.

An Easy-to-Use GUI   The adapter provides its own design-time component, namely the adapter palette, which seamlessly integrates with TIBCO Designer. This easy-to-use interface allows you to quickly configure adapter-specific features. You can use it to enter, delete, and modify configuration information. Additionally, you can import metadata using the adapter palette.

Support for Internationalization    The adapter provides internationalization support based on the Unicode support provided by the TIBCO Adapter SDK. Support is provided for string data only. Schema, metadata, error messages, and all other non-string information do not support extended character sets. The encoding used by the adapter is UTF16_LittleEndian.

Support for Recordset Data Type   The adapter supports Microsoft ADODB Recordset pointers as method parameters.

Support for ADO Connection Data Type   The adapter supports Microsoft ADODB Connection pointers as method parameters.

Microsoft .NET Framework Compliance   The adapter works seamlessly with Microsoft .NET components and clients. You can call a .NET component from a COM client or vice versa, using the adapter. A test example suite is also provided with the adapter installation for reference.

Runtime Connection Management   The adapter starts trying to establish connection with out-proc COM servers at periodic intervals once it loses the connection with the COM server.

Support for Dual Message Transports   The adapter supports the following message transports:

Distributed Queue Support   A distributed queue is a group of cooperating transport objects, each in a separate process. Each transport object is called a member. To balance the transmission load among servers, the adapter can use distributed queues for one-of-n delivery of messages to a group of servers. Each member of a distributed queue must listen for the same subject using the TIBCO Rendezvous Distributed Queue listener objects. Even though many members listen for each inbound message (or task), only one member processes the message. For details on distributed queues, see TIBCO Rendezvous Concepts.

In the queue mode within TIBCO Enterprise for JMS, each listener is a single receiver of a point-to-point message. However, the listeners can be configured as a set of receivers, each of which receives a fraction of the messages. For details on TIBCO Enterprise for JMS distributed queues, see the TIBCO Enterprise for JMS User’s Guide.

Load balancing for the processing of TIBCO Rendezvous or JMS certified messages is supported using distributed queuing. The messages from TIBCO Rendezvous or TIBCO Enterprise for JMS are distributed equally among all instances that belong to the same group. This distributes the data load over several adapter instances. However, the order in which the data is sent to the application server is not guaranteed.

Support for Quality of Service   The adapter supports the following levels of service for TIBCO Rendezvous wire formats:

The adapter supports the following levels of service for the JMS wire formats:

Platform Interoperability   The adapter allows COM-based applications to easily interoperate with applications running on other platforms. For example, a Microsoft Windows application can make method calls through a COM interface to publish documents that are transported over the TIBCO messaging transport and consumed by a listening process running on a UNIX machine. Alternatively, a RPC client running on a UNIX machine can send an operation request to a RPC Server running in the service component of TIBCO Adapter for COM and have this request converted into an invocation of a method on a COM object.

Scalability   Since the adapter is multi threaded, a single message being processed by the adapter does not become a bottleneck for subsequent messages. Simultaneous processing of messages results in high throughput and performance benefits. The TIBCO Rendezvous Distributed Queue and TIBCO Enterprise for JMS queue protocols for messaging allow peak load balancing between different instances of the same adapter configuration (subscription and request-response services) and also offers fault tolerance. In fault tolerance, when one listener fails, other listeners take over.

In the service component of the adapter, scalability can be achieved through three mechanisms:

A COM client can use multiple threads to invoke COM methods. The client:

Each method call is intercepted and processed by the interceptor component on the thread on which the method was called, so the interceptor scales as additional threads are created by the client.

The sample.dat project distributed with the adapter provides an example of how to achieve multi-threaded interceptor operation in a COM client.

High Availability   In the service component of the adapter, high availability is achieved by running multiple service components as members of a distributed queue group.


TIBCO Adapter™ for COM User’s Guide
Software Release 5.3, September 2005
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