Understanding EAI and the Role of eLink Adapters # Understanding EAI and the Role of eLink Adapters This chapter contains the following topics: BEA eLink Solution Overview BEA eLink Adapter for Vantive Overview ## BEA eLink Solution Overview BEA Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) provides an open solution that allows applications throughout organizations to communicate seamlessly. Using EAI, you gain the long-term flexibility and investment protection you need to keep up with today's ever-changing business environment. Typically, companies use packaged applications to automate internal operations, such as financial, manufacturing, human resources, etc. While they successfully address the needs of these specific areas, these proprietary platforms do not work together. To compete today, you need a much greater exchange of information. Systems need to communicate at both a database and a process level, within your own organization as well as with customer's and supplier's systems. BEA eLink Platform is the underlying basis of BEA eLink, a family of off-the-shelf enterprise application integration (EAI) products that leverage BEA's transaction platform to integrate existing legacy applications with customer-focused and business-to-business e-commerce initiatives. BEA eLink Platform provides a proven, rock-solid infrastructure for integrating applications within the enterprise and across the Web. BEA eLink Platform ensures high-performance, secure transactions and transparent access to mission-critical applications and information throughout the enterprise and across the Web. Figure 1-1 illustrates the eLink logical architecture and shows where the eLink Adapters fit into the process. Figure 1-1 BEA eLink Solution Illustration ### The BEA eLink Platform The BEA eLink Platform (in addition to all options and adapters) is highly scalable. Multiple instances of BEA eLink Platforms can collaborate so that work is divided between eLink instances and domains. BEA eLink includes SNMP integration for enterprise management. The BEA eLink Platform features compliance with the Open Group's X/Open standards including support of the XA standard for Two-phase commit processing, the X/Open ATMI API, and XPG standards for language internationalization. C, C++ and Java (via Jolt) are supported. The BEA eLink Platform connects to any RDBMS, OODBMS, file manager or queue manager. The following components operate with BEA eLink Platform: The Data Integration Option translates data models used by different applications into a common data format. It provides a cost-effective alternative to writing or generating programs to perform this function. It also handles complex translation with greater power and scalability than rules engines and formatters. The Business Process Option helps automate tasks in the business process and dynamically responds to business events and exceptions. The eLink Adapter provide the interface between the BEA eLink Platform and external applications, with out-of-the-box functionality (no programming required). ## BEA eLink Adapter for Vantive Overview The BEA eLink Adapter for Vantive software provides communication between Vantive Enterprise applications and BEA TUXEDO applications. The eLink Adapter for Vantive provides functionality to query and update information that is stored and maintained by Vantive. Figure 1-2 BEA eLink Adapter for Vantive Illustration The eLink Adapter for Vantive offers one TUXEDO service called EL_VANTIVE_IN. This is a generic service that processes all the requests to invoke Vantive functionality. The eLink Adapter for Vantive advertises the Vantive functionality that it invokes as TUXEDO services and aliases them to the EL_VANTIVE_IN service. Vantive functionality that can be invoked and their advertised service names are configurable. ### Understanding the EL_VANTIVE_IN Service The eLink Adapter for Vantive consists of one generic service, EL_VANTIVE_IN. This service can be advertised with different names to invoke Vantive functionality. The eLink Adapter for Vantive service can be invoked by different TUXEDO applications. The EL_VANTIVE_IN service is generic in nature and does not possess any knowledge about the Vantive business objects that it is going to operate upon. The information required to perform any business operation, such as the type of operation, business objects to act upon, or the input and output fields are read from the eLink Adapter for Vantive configuration file. This allows the service to be generic in nature. When a request is made, the service receives the FML buffer. The service then determines the object or form to be used and opens it in Vantive using the VANAPI functions. The VANAPI allows the eLink Adapter for Vantive to call the Vantive application and invoke business services. Any mandatory field error will be generated by Vantive functions and passed to calling applications using standard TUXEDO error management functions. Upon completing the operation, the service returns the values for all the output fields listed in the configuration file using the FML32 buffer. [Table of Contents] [Prev] [Next]