Differences between WebSphere Adapters and WebSphere Business Integration Adapters

There are several differences between WebSphere Adapters and WebSphere Business Integration Adapters. These distinctions are most important during development of applications. When deploying applications to a running server, the nature of the adapters used affects some of the steps which need to be followed.

Adapters provide communication mechanisms between enterprise information systems (EISs) and WebSphere applications. To illustrate the operation of the adapters figures, 1 and 2 provide details of the communication between WebSphere Process Server and the EIS for the two types of adapter.

Figure 1. Detailed schematic of a WebSphere Adapter.The image shows a detailed schematic of WebSphere Process Server working with a WebSphere Adapter.

Figure 1 depicts a WebSphere Adapter managing the connectivity between a J2EE component supported by WebSphere Process Server and the EIS. The WebSphere Adapter resides inside WebSphere Process Server.

Figure 2. Detailed schematic of a WebSphere Business Integration Adapter.The image shows a detailed schematic of WebSphere Process Server working with a WebSphere Business Integration Adapter.

Figure 2 shows a WebSphere Business Integration Adapter mediating communication between the WebSphere Integration Broker and the EIS. The integration broker communicates with the WebSphere Business Integration Adapter via a Java Messaging Service (JMS) transport layer.

Differences between the two types of adapter include:
Table 1. Differences between WebSphere Adapters and WebSphere Business Integration Adapters.
Feature WebSphere Adapters WebSphere Business Integration Adapters
JCA Compliance Fully JCA compliant (version 1.5). Not JCA-compliant.
Connectivity Manager Rely on standard JCA contracts to manage life cycle tasks such as starting and stopping. Rely on WebSphere Adapter Framework to manage connectivity.
Event Notification Use an EventStore subclass to retrieve events from an EIS. Manage event notification using a pollFor Events method.
Request Processing Clients directly invoke one of several interaction contracts to query or modify data in the EIS. Rely on an integration server and the WebSphere Adapter Framework to initiate and help process requests.
Data Models Use an Enterprise Metadata Discovery (EMD) utility to parse an EIS and develop Service Data Objects (SDOs) and other useful artifacts. The EMD is part of the WebSphere Adapter implementation. Use a separate Object Discovery Agent (ODA) to introspect an EIS and generate business object definition schemas.
Integration Run on WebSphere Process Server. Reside outside the application server. The server or integration broker communicates with the adapter via a Java Message Service (JMS) transport layer.
WebSphere Adapters are the recommended tool.

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Last updated: Thu Apr 27 14:23:46 2006

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