Differences from BusinessWorks Administration

The deployment, administration, and life-cycle management of an adapter application is closely patterned on similar functionality provided by TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks™, but there are some differences between the Adapter administration and BusinessWorks administration.

If an application is configured with one or more adapter configurations and BusinessWorks processes, you have to use the TIBCO ActiveMatrix Adapter Framework administration utilities to deploy and manage adapters, and use the TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks administration utilities to deploy and manage the BusinessWorks processes of the application at the same time.

The following are major differences between the Adapter administration and the BusinessWorks administration:
  • Use of the tibhawkagent utility to provide monitoring and control of runtime adapters.
  • Use of the adapteragent utility to provide administration controls for runtime adapters, instead of the bwagent utility.

    The BusinessWorks agent can run in local and enterprise modes, but the adapter agent can only run in enterprise mode.

  • Use of the adapteradmin utility as a command-line interface to manage the core entities, domains, AppSpaces, Adapter nodes, EAR files and applications for adapter configurations, instead of the bwadmin utility.
  • Use of AdapterNodes at the node level, instead of AppNodes.
  • Adapters and adapter instances.

    An adapter represents a configuration created for a specific type of adapter in the application module (same as Eclipse project). An application module can contain multiple adapter configurations. An adapter instance is a running instance of one of such configurations on a specific adapter node of an app space.

  • Differences between the applications at run time.

    At design time, adapter applications and BusinessWorks applications have no major differences. If a BusinessWorks application is configured with an adapter configuration, it is also an adapter application. When an EAR file is generated, artifacts of both technology types, BusinessWorks and Adapters, are packaged inside it.

    However, there is a major difference at run time. When an EAR file is deployed to an adapter agent, it creates an adapter application; when it is deployed to a BusinessWorks agent, it creates a BusinessWorks application.

    At design time, the palette that comes with the TIBCO ActiveMatrix Adapter Framework installation contains a set of adapter activities, which can be used to communicate with other process activities and adapters. A process containing adapter activities is deployed on bwadmin, not on adapteradmin.