Outbound Contracts

The Connector Architecture defines system-level contracts between an application server and an EIS that enable outbound connectivity to an EIS: connection management, transaction management, and security.

Connection Management Contract

The connection management contract supports connection pooling, a technique that enhances application performance and scalability. Connection pooling is transparent to the application, which simply obtains a connection to the EIS.

Transaction Management Contract

The Connector Architecture supports the concept of transactions - a number of operations that must be committed together or not at all for the data to remain consistent and to maintain data integrity.

A local transaction is limited in scope to a single EIS system, and the EIS resource manager itself manages such transaction. An XA transaction or global transaction can span multiple resource managers. This form of transaction requires transaction coordination by an external transaction manager, typically bundled with an application server. A transaction manager uses a two-phase commit protocol to manage a transaction that spans multiple resource managers or EISs. It uses one-phase commit optimization if only one resource manager is participating in an XA transaction.

The Connector Architecture defines a transaction management contract between an application server and a resource adapter . The transaction management contract extends the connection management contract and provides support for management of both local and XA transactions. These contracts enable an application server to provide the infrastructure and runtime environment for transaction management. Application components rely on this transaction infrastructure to support the component-level transaction model.

An application server is required to support all three levels of transactions:

• No transaction support at all - this is typical of legacy applications and back-end systems.

• Support for only local transactions

• Support for both local and XA transactions

Security Management Contract

The security management contract provides mechanisms for authentication, authorization, and secure communication between a Java EE server and an EIS to protect the information in the EIS.