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:
The diagrams in this section use shaded icons to indicate TIBCO components and non shaded icons to indicate other components.
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.
As shown in the next diagram, when an application receives a request to create a new customer record, the application notifies the adapter about the request and the adapter publishes the event.
The following steps correspond to steps listed in the diagram:
An adapter subscription service asynchronously performs an actionsuch as updating business objects or invoking native APIson a vendor application. The adapter service listens to external business events, which trigger the appropriate action.
Going back 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.
The following steps correspond to the new steps listed in the diagram:
In addition to asynchronously publishing and subscribing to events, an adapter can be used to synchronously retrieve data from or execute 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.
In the next example, an adapter receives a request message from the TIBCO infrastructure and sends it to an application. The adapter gets a response from the application and returns it.
The following steps correspond to steps listed in the diagram:
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 synchronously invoke functionality on an external system.
The next diagram shows 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.
The next table summarizes the services introduced in this section.
TIBCO Adapter™ Concepts April 2005 Copyright © TIBCO Software Inc. All rights reserved www.tibco.com |