Oracle Adapters

Introduction to Oracle JCA Adapters

Adapters support a robust, light weight, highly scalable, and standards-based integration framework, which enables disparate applications to communicate with each other. For example, adapters enable you to integrate packaged applications, legacy applications, databases, and Web services. Using Oracle JCA Adapters, you can ensure interoperability by integrating applications that are heterogeneous, provided by different vendors, based on different technologies, and run on different platforms.

Features of Oracle JCA Adapters:-

Oracle JCA Adapters provide the following benefits:

• Provide a connectivity platform for integrating complex business processes: Adapters integrate mainframe and legacy applications with enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), databases, and messaging systems. Oracle provides adapters to connect various packaged applications, such as SAP and Siebel, and databases. In addition, adapters integrate middleware messaging systems, such as MQSeries and Oracle Advanced Queuing, and legacy applications, such as CICS and Tuxedo, to provide a complete solution.

• Support open standards: Adapters are based on a set of standards such as J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) version 1.5, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Web Service Definition Language (WSDL). The support for standards reduces the learning curve of a user and eliminates the dependency of users on a single vendor.

• Service Component Architecture (SCA) assembly model: Provides the service details and their interdependencies to form composite applications. SCA enables you to represent business logic as reusable service components that can be easily integrated into any SCA-compliant application. The resulting application is known as an SOA composite application. The specification for the SCA standard is maintained by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

• Implement a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): The support for open standards enables adapters to implement an SOA, which facilitates loose coupling, flexibility, and extensibility.

• Use native APIs: Adapters support multiple ways of interfacing with the back-end system and provide various deployment options. Using native APIs, adapters communicate with the back-end application and also translate the native data to standard XML, which is provided to the client.

• Model data: Adapters convert native APIs to standard XML and back, based on the adapter metadata configured during design time. Adapter configurations are defined during design time, which will be used by run-time components.

• Facilitate real-time and bidirectional connectivity: Adapters offer bidirectional communication with various back-end systems. This includes sending requests to back-end systems and receiving a response. Adapters also support the real-time event notification service. This service notifies about the back-end events associated with successful back-end transactions for creating, deleting, and updating back-end data. This two-way connectivity ensures faster, flexible, efficient integration, and reduces the cost of integration.

• Maximize availability: Oracle JCA Adapters are based on the J2CA 1.5 specification. Adapters can, therefore, fully leverage the scalability and high availability of the underlying Oracle Application Server platform.

For more information, see Oracle Fusion Middleware Programming Resource Adapters for Oracle WebLogic Server.

In addition, adapters can be deployed on the JBoss and WebSphere platforms.

• Provide easy-to-use design-time tools: Adapters use design-time tools that provide a graphical user interface (GUI) to configure and administer adapters for fast implementation and deployment. In addition, the tools let you to browse, download, and configure back-end schemas.

• Support seamless integration with Oracle Application Server components: Adapters integrate with Oracle Fusion Middleware. Adapters integrate with the JCA Binding Component of the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform, thereby seamlessly integrating with other service engines and binding components.

Types of Oracle JCA Adapters

Oracle JCA Adapters include:-

• Oracle Technology Adapters

• Legacy Adapters

• Packaged-Application Adapters

• Oracle Adapter for Oracle Applications

Oracle Technology Adapters

Oracle technology adapters integrate Oracle Application Server and Oracle Fusion Middleware components such as Oracle BPEL Process Manager (Oracle BPEL PM) or Oracle Mediator components to file systems, FTP servers, database queues (advanced queues, or AQ), Java Message Services (JMS), database tables, and message queues (MQ Series).

These adapters include:

·         Oracle JCA Adapter for Files/FTP

·         Oracle JCA Adapter for Sockets

·         Oracle JCA Adapter for Oracle Streams Advanced Queuing (Oracle JCA Adapter for AQ)

·         Oracle JCA Adapter for JMS

·         Oracle JCA Adapter for Database

·         Oracle JCA Adapter for MQ Series

Oracle technology adapters are installed as part of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Legacy Adapters

Legacy adapters integrate Oracle Application Server with legacy and mainframe applications using legacy communication protocols.

These adapters include:

·         OracleAS Adapter for Tuxedo

·         OracleAS Adapter for CICS

·         OracleAS Adapter for VSAM

·         OracleAS Adapter for IMS/TM

·         OracleAS Adapter for IMS/DB

Packaged-Application Adapters

Packaged-application adapters integrate Oracle Application Server with various packaged applications, such as SAP and Siebel.

These adapters include:

·         OracleAS Adapter for PeopleSoft

·         OracleAS Adapter for SAP R/3

·         OracleAS Adapter for Siebel

·         OracleAS Adapter for J.D. Edwards

Oracle Adapter for Oracle Applications

Oracle Applications are built on a unified information architecture that consolidates data from Oracle and non-Oracle applications and enables a consistent definition of customers, suppliers, partners, and employees across the entire enterprise. This results in a suite of applications that can give you information, such as current performance metrics, financial ratios, profit and loss summaries. To connect Oracle Applications to non-Oracle applications, you use Oracle Adapter for Oracle Applications.

“Adapter for Oracle Applications is also informally known as Oracle E-Business Suite Adapter”

Oracle Adapter for Oracle Applications provides comprehensive, bidirectional, multimodal, synchronous, and asynchronous connectivity to Oracle Applications.