Introducing Application Integration
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WebLogic Integration provides a standards-based integration solution for connecting applications both within and between enterprises. WebLogic Integration provides the following tools for integrating applications:
By using these tools, you can integrate all your enterprise information systems. Typical IT organizations use several highly specialized applications. Without a common integration platform, integration of such applications requires extensive, highly specialized development efforts.
WebLogic Integration makes use of adapters to establish a single enterprise-wide framework for integrating current or future applications. Adapters greatly simplify your integration efforts because they allow you to integrate each application with a single application server, and thus avoid the need to integrate every application with every other application.
The BEA WebLogic Adapters for WebLogic Integration enable fast, simple, and robust enterprise application integration. Compliant with the J2EETM Connector Architecture specification from Sun Microsystems, Inc., each adapter provides bi-directional, request-response integration with a specific application, protocol, or technology. You purchase the individual adapters you want, and then install them to work in conjunction with BEA WebLogic Integration. User information on specific adapters is available at http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/index.html. Please check the BEA web site or contact Customer Support for platform support information.
The BEA WebLogic Adapters for WebLogic Integration provide:
In addition to the BEA WebLogic Adapters for WebLogic Integration, developers can create custom adapters using the WebLogic Integration Adapter Development Kit (ADK). The ADK is a set of tools for implementing the events and services supported by BEA WebLogic Integration. The process of creating custom adapters with the ADK is described in Developing Adapters at the following URL:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13214_01/wli/docs81/devadapt/index.html
Note: Throughout the rest of this document, the term adapter refers to any of the BEA WebLogic Adapters for WebLogic Integration, while the term custom adapter refers to any custom adapter that was created using the ADK.
An enterprise information system (EIS) is an application that provides the information infrastructure for an enterprise. An EIS offers its clients a set of services that are made available to clients via local and/or remote interfaces. Examples of EISs include:
The BEA WebLogic Adapters for WebLogic Integration work with the most popular and widely used EISs. The adapters enable organizations to quickly design and deploy integration solutions that involve existing and future EIS resources. Adapters simplify integration efforts by providing robust, standards based connectivity with various applications within a coherent framework built on top of WebLogic Server.
The BEA WebLogic Adapters for WebLogic Integration are implementations of the J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) version 1.0, from Sun Microsystems, Inc. The JCA is used for integrating J2EE-compliant application servers with enterprise information systems (EIS). The JCA consists of two parts: an EIS-specific resource adapter (such as those provided in the BEA WebLogic Adapters for WebLogic Integration) and an application server (such as BEA WebLogic Server) that the resource adapter plugs into.
The JCA defines a set of contracts, such as transactions, security, and connection management, that a resource adapter must support in order to plug in to an application server. For more information, see the Sun JCA page at the following URL:
http://java.sun.com/j2ee/connector/
The BEA WebLogic Adapters for WebLogic Integration are crucial components of a comprehensive enterprise integration framework that provides:
WebLogic Integration helps you use adapters to define business-focused interfaces to an EIS. These interfaces, called application views, provide a simple, consistent, self-describing interface to services and events in an application. Unlike adapter users, application view users are not required to have intimate knowledge of the EIS or its client interface. As a result, users who are not programmers, such as technical analysts, can use application views.
You use application view controls in WebLogic Workshop to interact with an EIS through an application view. Application view controls allow a business process engineer to browse the hierarchy of application views, invoke a service as a business process action, and start a new business process when an EIS event occurs.
Adapters are used in conjunction with the application integration capabilities of BEA WebLogic Integration. These capabilities provides a systematic, standards-based architecture for hosting business-oriented interfaces to enterprise applications.
The following illustration shows how the various application integration components interact.
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