The Purpose of Adapters
In the past, when we sought to connect Application A to Application B, or Applications A and B to an integration server, we had to interact with that application using some sort of interface that the application (hopefully) provided. Interfaces into applications and databases vary greatly, including everything from simple well-defined APIs to complex and cryptic exit calls, or perhaps something one level above screen scraping.
After hand-coding the interfaces to the middleware layer a few hundred times, in essence creating mini-applications between the source or target applications and the middleware layer, middleware vendors began to pitch the notion of adapters (see Figure 10.1).
Figure 10.1. Before adapters, developers ...
Get Next Generation Application Integration: From Simple Information to Web Services now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
