InterChange Server Express

InterChange Server Express is a multi-threaded, Java-based execution framework for collaborations. InterChange Server Express runs within its own Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This section describes the following services and features of InterChange Server Express:

Event management service

The InterChange Server Express persistently stores every business object that it receives during the execution of a collaboration. This allows the InterChange Server Express to recover from an unexpected termination or from the failure of a collaboration without losing event notifications or calls.

Connector controllers

A connector controller is an interface between the client-side of a connector and the InterChange Server Express. A connector controller routes business objects as they traverse the IBM WebSphere Business Integration Server Express system, linking the client-side of connectors to collaborations and managing the mapping process.

Through the connector controller, an administrator can:

Repository

The InterChange Server Express maintains configuration information and definitions of all objects in a persistent store called the InterChange Server Express repository, which consists of a set of tables in a relational database. The tables store object definitions and configuration information in the form of XML documents.

Database connectivity service

The database connectivity service manages interactions between the InterChange Server Express and the repository. The database connectivity service interacts with the repository by means of the Java Database Connectivity API (JDBC).

Database connection pools

You can use the System Manager tool of the IBM WebSphere Business Integration Server Express system to define database connection pools in InterChange Server Express. User-defined database connection pools make it possible for developers to directly access relational databases from within a collaboration or map. This feature provides support for

Transactional collaborations

The IBM WebSphere Business Integration Server Express system supports services that can run a collaboration as if it were a type of transaction.

Transactional qualities are desirable for collaborations where data consistency is important across applications. Like other transactions, a transactional collaboration involves a set of steps. If an error occurs, the InterChange Server Express can undo each completed step, performing a transaction-like rollback.

However, collaborations are different from traditional transactions in some important ways:

The techniques that the InterChange Server Express uses to support transactional collaborations, therefore, differ from those that support traditional transactions. The transaction levels associated with collaborations define the rigor with which the InterChange Server Express enforces transactional semantics.

Recovery features

An InterChange Server Express implementation provides features for improving the time it takes InterChange Server Express to reboot after a failure, for making InterChange Server Express available for other work before all flows have been recovered, and for controlling the resubmission of failed events:

Copyright IBM Corp. 2004, 2005