This chapter provides an overview and some background to the concept of adapters.
In today's business environment, responsiveness and flexibility are increasingly important. There are continual demands for rapid change, and the consequences of a slow response may be severe. In their effort to streamline their business processes and to meet new business requirements, companies develop or acquire new applications. Integrating these applications into larger systems presents these companies with a major challenge.
Whether the business need is to share business data across disparate Enterprise Information System (EIS) assets, automate business processes across EISs, employees, and business partners, connect new e-business applications to existing EISs, or provide users with access to EIS business data, there is a requirement to provide a common interface. And this is where the concept of an adapter comes in.
IBM WebSphere Business Integration adapters provide a large suite of ready-to-use adapters for interfacing to various EISs. These adapters are based on a common framework which allows the adapters to be developed, configured, and operated in a consistent manner, while at the same time they can be deployed in a number of different business configurations.
The chapter contains the following sections: