Tools

 

The ADK provides a robust set of tools to assist you in developing adapters and the design-time GUI.

This section includes information on the following subjects:

• Sample Adapter

• The GenerateAdapterTemplate Utility

• ADK Javadoc

• Ant-Based Build Process

• XML Tools

 

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Sample Adapter

The ADK contains a sample adapter that provides non-EIS specific code examples to help you start building an adapter. (Do not confuse this sample adapter with the eMail and DBMS example adapters also included with Application Integration; these example adapters are documented in The DBMS Sample Adapter and The eMail Sample Adapter). You can find the sample adapter in <WLAI_HOME>/dev/sample.

Why Use the Sample Adapter?

The purpose of the sample adapter is to free you from much of the coding necessary to build an adapter. It provides concrete implementations of key abstract classes that only require customization for your specific EIS. In addition, the ADK provides the GenerateAdapterTemplate utility with which you can quickly clone the sample adapter development tree for use by the adapter you are developing. See The GenerateAdapterTemplate Utility.

What's In the Sample Adapter

Specifically the sample adapter contains:

sample.spi.ManagedConnectionFactoryImpl

A concrete extension to AbstractManagedConnectionFactory that you can customize for a specific EIS.

sample.spi.ManagedConnectionImpl

A concrete extension to AbstractManagedConnection that you can customize this class for a specific EIS.

sample.spi.ConnectionMetaDataImpl

A concrete extension to AbstractConnectionMetaData that you can customize for a specific EIS.

sample.web.DesignTimeRequestHandler

A concrete extension to AbstractDesignTimeRequestHandler that shows how to add an event or service at designtime.

sample.event.EventGenerator

A concrete extension to AbstractPullEventGenerator that shows how to extend the ADK base class to construct an event generator.

Note: For more details on the classes extended by those in the sample adapter, please refer to the ADK Javadocs.

 

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The GenerateAdapterTemplate Utility

To facilitate using the sample adapter, the ADK provides GenerateAdapterTemplate, a command-line utility you can use to clone the sample adapter development tree and create a new adapter development tree. See Creating a Custom Development Environment for complete instructions on using this tool.

 

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ADK Javadoc

ADK classes, interfaces, methods, and constructors are defined in the development kit's Javadocs. Javadocs are included with the ADK installation and are stored in <WLAI_HOME>\dev\doc\api.

 

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Ant-Based Build Process

The ADK employs a build process based upon Ant, a 100% pure Java-based build tool. For the ADK, Ant does the following:

• Creates a Java archive (.jar) file for the adapter.

• Creates a .war file for an adapter's web application.

• Creates a .rar file for a J2EE-compliant adapter.

Why Use Ant?

Traditionally, build tools are inherently shell-based. They evaluate a set of dependencies and then execute commands, not unlike those you would issue on a shell. While it is simple to extend these tools by using or writing any program for your operating system, you are also limited to that OS, or at least that OS type (for example, Unix).

Ant is preferable to shell-based make tools for the following reasons:

• Instead of a model where it is extended with shell-based commands, it is extended using Java classes.

• Instead of writing shell commands, the configuration files are XML-based, calling out a target tree where various tasks get executed. Each task is run by an object that implements a particular task interface. While this removes some of the expressive power inherent in being able to construct a shell command, it gives your application the ability to be cross-platform.

• If you want to execute a shell command, Ant has an execute rule that allows different commands to be executed based on the OS upon which it executing.

For complete instruction on setting up Ant, see Step 2c: Setting Up the Build Process.

 

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XML Tools

The ADK ships with two XML development tools. While not part of the design-time component, these tools are required for building a design-time GUI. These tools are considered part of the metadata support layer for the design-time framework. These tools are:

• Schema Object Model (SOM), which is an API for programmatically building XML schemas. An adapter calls into an EIS for specific request/response metadata, which then needs to be programatically transformed into an XML schema. The SOM is a set of tools that extracts many of the common details, such as syntactical complexities of schema so that you can focus on its more fundamental aspects.

• IDocument, which provides the x-path interface to a document object model (DOM) document.

For more information on both of these tools, please refer to their respective Javadocs:

• For SOM, go to <WLAI_HOME>\dev\doc\com\bea\schema.

• For iDocument, go to <WLAI_HOME>\dev\doc\com\bea\document.