Role of adapters

To understand the competitive value of the IBM WebSphere Business Integration adapter portfolio, you must understand the way adapters work, and the design decisions upon which they are based.

Issues

Adapters are may be either the least visible element in a solution, or are given exaggerated importance. This depends on the vendor selling the solution.

Application server or integration broker vendors with weak adapter offerings tend to downplay the role of the adapters. They refer to the new J2EE Connector Architecture (J2C) standard, implying that it will solve all adapter issues, or they rely upon third-party vendors to provide adapters for the various systems.

An integration vendor that offers "intelligent" adapters may claim that a true adapter should contain intelligence regarding the business logic of the source and target application. This argument compensates for the lack of an integration server that can provide a sophisticated enterprise integration solution. Such adapters are commonly used to address a tactical need, but they do not offer the degree of flexibility and reuse required by an enterprise integration infrastructure.

Solution

IBM WebSphere Business Integration adapters offer a basic communication interface into or out of the application for which they were developed. They also act as a first abstraction layer for the integration server through the representation of business transactions in the form of business objects.

WebSphere Business Integration adapters can be used in simple or complex business integration solutions, providing access to EIS business data for application connectivity, process integration, e-business applications, and business portals.

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