Integration with external systems using adapters

No discussion about mediations fundamentals is complete without talking about Adapters. Let's take closer look at what these are.

What are adapters?

We have, on numerous instances, explained about web services. In a raw sense web services can be treated as adapters. Let's suppose you want to expose a capability or capabilities out of an application such that there is an access point mechanism through which the particular capability can be programmatically invoked. This access point is the adapter. The adapter provides you with not just connectivity to the end application but also with connectivity to access data and perform protocol transformation and any other capabilities including, and not limited to, connection setup and tear down, marshalling and unmarshalling of data, exception handling and so on. The adapter is also referred to as a connector.

Connectors typically tend to enable synchronous connections to applications. Unlike connectors...