At the most basic level, a TIBCO Adapter makes data available from a source application or allows information resulting from transactions in a TIBCO application to be entered into a target application. This is often discussed in terms of a services architecture. Services are abstractions that describe how adapters work together with other applications.
Publish/subscribe interactions are driven by events such as the arrival of data or a timer signaling that a specified interval has expired. The following services are available for publish/subscribe interactions.
An adapter publication service makes information about source application business events available to other applications enabled for the TIBCO environment. For example, an adapter can publish an event each time an order changes its status in an Oracle database.
An adapter subscription service gets information about business events from the TIBCO environment and writes the information into a target application. For example, an adapter can subscribe to events that indicate the creation of a new customer and then enter the customer information into a Siebel customer care target application.
Demand-driven computing suits distributed applications that require point-to-point messages. In request/response interactions, data providers coordinate closely with data consumers. A provider does not send data until a consumer requests it.
The server sends replies to the client that requested the data. The client listens until it receives the reply, and then stops listening (unless it expects further installments of information).
An adapter request-response service acts as a server, which retrieves information on demand and accepts instructions to perform transactions in the target application.
An adapter request-response invocation service acts as a client, which sends a request for information or actions from the target application to another application.