The Business Integration Express for Item Sync system uses a central infrastructure (InterChange Server Express) and modular components in a hub-and-spoke design.
In this design, business-process logic resides in collaborations at the hub; data is exchanged between the hub and the spokes in the form of business objects. Connectors, supply connectivity to applications (or to web servers or other programmatic entities) at the spokes.
The components of the system include:
An integration broker that functions as the hub for data exchanges.
Collaborations are software modules that contain logic that describes a distributed business process. Collaborations coordinate the functionality of business processes for disparate applications and enable data exchange between them. Collaborations are the hub; through them, data is exchanged in the form of business objects.
The UCCnet_ItemSync collaboration, and several related collaborations, are pre-built templates from which you configure collaboration objects (see the Quick Start Guide for details). The collaboration objects enable suppliers to automatically add items to, update or delist items within, or withdraw items from UCCnet when item updates are made in their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)applications. When an item is updated in a supplier's ERP system, item data is automatically validated, reformatted, and sent to the UCCnet standard registry. The collaboration objects also provide a single process for communicating item information to trading partners via UCCnet. Thus, a supplier's enterprise data is synchronized with item data sent outside the enterprise.
Each adapter includes a component that provides connectivity (referred to as a connector throughout this guide) and (for many adapters) a mechanism that generates or provides application-specific business objects that are used by that connector.
The connectors transform data from the application into business objects that can be manipulated by the collaborations, and transform business objects from the collaborations into data that can be received by the specific application. Each connector consists of two parts--the connector controller and the connector agent. The connector controller interacts directly with WebSphere InterChange Server Express collaboration objects and resides on a server that has implemented InterChange Server Express (the hub in a hub-and-spoke relationship). The connector agent interacts directly with an application, and can reside with that application on any server.
Business objects are the messages used by the Business Integration Express for Item Sync system for exchanging data.
Maps are used between a business object that is structured for the data model of a specific application and a business object that is generically structured for use by collaborations at the hub.