Until now, we have studied two different ways of creating services in the Enterprise Integrator server: Proxies and APIs. Both of them are using the axis2 layer, and although we can configure the incoming ports, these are static and are applied globally for all the services deployed in the server. Also, after every change in the setup, we need to reboot the server in order to apply the changes.
However, this is different with the inbound endpoints; it's a message entry point that does not use the axis2 layer, but directly gets the message from the transport layer and sends it to the mediation layer. The Enterprise Integrator has four different inbound endpoint types:
- Listening
- Polling
- Event-Based
- Custom
We can see that in the following diagram:
Inbound Endpoints