Communication between the application and the connector is a major component in the overall connector design. If the application runs on a different operating system from InterChange Server and the connector, you must ensure that a mechanism is in place to allow the connector access to the application.
If the application provides an API, determine whether the API handles the communication between the operating system of the application and that of the connector. For example, if the application runs on UNIX and the connector and InterChange Server run on Windows 2000, the application API might enable the connector and application to communicate across operating systems.
Figure 19 shows an example communication mechanism between an ODBC connector running on Windows 2000 and an ODBC-based application running on UNIX. The connector builds dynamic SQL statements and executes them using the ODBC API. The ODBC driver enables the connector to establish a connection with the application database and to access the database using ODBC SQL statements.