Adapter Services Examples


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.

Publication Service

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.

Figure 2
Adapter publication service

The following steps correspond to steps listed in the diagram:

  1. Using a graphical user interface, a new customer record is created in the application.
  2. The application sends the new customer record to the adapter.
  3. The adapter publishes the event using TIBCO messaging.

Subscription Service

An adapter subscription service asynchronously performs an action—such as updating business objects or invoking native APIs—on 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.

Figure 3
Adapter subscription service

The following steps correspond to the new steps listed in the diagram:

  1. The adapter is configured to listen to customer record creation events as they are published.
  2. Upon reception of a customer creation event, the adapter updates the application to which it is connected.

Request-Response Service

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.

Figure 4
Adapters retrieve data

The following steps correspond to steps listed in the diagram:

  1. An application sends a message request to the TIBCO environment.
  2. The adapter, acting as a request-response server receives the request and forwards the request to the application.
  3. The application parses the request and returns a response message to the adapter.
  4. The adapter sends the response message back to the TIBCO infrastructure where the response is available to the requesting application.

Request-Response Invocation Service

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.

Figure 5
Adapters act as proxies

Adapter Services Summary

The next table summarizes the services introduced in this section.

Table 1 Adapter Services Summary
Service
Initiator
Target
Event Mode
Publishing service
(sends to target)
Vendor application
TIBCO infrastructure
Asynchronous
Subscribing service
(gets from initiator)
TIBCO infrastructure
Vendor application
Asynchronous
Request-response service
(gets from initiator, waits for response then sends response to target)
TIBCO infrastructure
Vendor application
Synchronous
Request-response invocation service
(sends to target, waits for response, then sends response to initiator)
Vendor application
TIBCO infrastructure
Synchronous


TIBCO Adapter™ Concepts
April 2005
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