Overview of the connector

The connector is a runtime component of the WebSphere Business Integration Adapter for Web Services. The connector allows businesses to aggregate, publish, and consume web services for use either within their organization or by trading partners. The connector and other components described in this document provide the functionality needed to exchange business object information in the body of a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) message.

The Adapter for Web Services supports SOAP 1. 1 and 1.2 in conformance with Web Services-Interoperability Organization (WS-I). This adapter exposes WebSphere InterChange Server business processes, in the form of collaborations, as web services. You get a set of self-contained, dynamic applications that can be described, published, located, or invoked over the network to create innovative products, processes and value chains. This adapter can also communicate to externally hosted web services with enhanced configurability.

The Adapter for Web Services enables true bidirectional support for event and request processing from within the adapter. Event processing can be synchronous or asynchronous, and listeners within the adapter provide support for SOAP over HTTP, HTTPS, and JMS transports. Integration with the Web Services Gateway product exposes/invokes external services on behalf of the adapter. A Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Object Discovery Agent ( ODA) eases the generation and deployment of business objects. The ODA can retrieve WSDL from a local file or connect to a remote URL or Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry.

This chapter describes the scope, components, design tools, and architecture used to implement the WebSphere Business Integration Adapter for Web Services. It also provides an overview of tasks you must complete to install and configure the web services components described in this document. For information about installing and configuring the components, see Install, configure, and design checklist.

Note:
The adapter for Web Services implements the standard Adapter Framework API. For this reason, the adapter can operate with any integration broker that the Framework supports. However, the functionality provided by the adapter has been designed specifically to support the IBM WebSphere InterChange Server (ICS) integration broker. Accordingly, when you select the Expose as Web Service option in System Manager, this refers to InterChange Server, and not to any other integration broker.

Copyright IBM Corporation 1997, 2004. All Rights Reserved.