hi I am bit confused regarding this three terms. How exactly broker client is different from broker adapter? Is it necessary to change broker client or adapter to IS adapter to make effective use of 6.x architecture.

Thanks
Rawn

Rawn,

A broker (ES) adapter is one type of broker client. A broker client can be other things other than a broker adapter, such as the wM Enterprise tools (EI, Document Tracker, etc.). Almost anything that communicates with the broker is a broker client. Adapters also communicate with a resource, such as a database, which is why they are called adapters; they adapt the resource to the broker.

One should not normally need to change a working ES adapter or client to an IS adapter to make use of the 6.x architecture. IS can communicate with the old Enterprise Adapters through the Broker. (When it does this, it creates broker clients for itself on the Broker.)

– Ted

Thanks Ted for reply. I have couple of more questions after this.
1)when we need to need to broker clients rather than going for developing adapter
2)does it mean custom broker client/adapter written for activworks 3.0 will straightaway work with 6.1 broker.?
3)or it is better to develop IS adapter to replace this custom broker client/adapter.

thanks
Rawn

Rawn,

As Ted pointed out, it is not necessary to migrate Broker adapter to IS adapter. But with 6.x architecture, all the adapters will be hosted in IS. I believe wM will phase out all the Broker adapters over the period of time. So If you are doing new development and can use IS adapter, I would recommend to go for IS adapter.

With IS adapter, you will work with developer to develop integration. Developer is more robust than Enterprise Integrator and provides lots of nice features(like locking flow service) Also, I expect that wM will provide plugins to work with SCCS.

So if you can work with IS adapter.

-Ramesh

Rawn,

Just a clarification. If you use a trigger in Integration Server to subscribe to a document and pass it on to an underlying flow service, then you are in effect, creating a broker client that resides in the Integration Server space.

With regards to the other broker clients, there are real-world requirements to put java or COM-based broker clients out in the field. It’s an older architecture, but it seems to work pretty well. You can have broker clients or you can have broker admin clients.

To confuse matters, you can also create a java client that uses the TContext classes of the client.jar API that communicates directly with Integration Server. With the TContext class, you can utilize the guaranteed delivery features of the Integration Server Platform. This solution does not use the broker.

As Ramesh pointed out in the previous post, it is preferable to use existing adapters. webMethods places a tremendous amount of emphasis on quality assurance on their released products. In my opinion, you are always better off using off the shelf components rather than reinventing the wheel.

HTH

Ray

Thanks guys for clearing my confusion to some extent.
another question can I convert these broker clients or custom adapters based on 3.1 architecture to 6.1 IS Coded services(Java/C)to integrate with resource application?

Thanks
Rawn

Rawn,

Let me try to answer your secondary questions directly.

1. I’m not sure if I’ve parsed your English correctly, but I think you mean to ask “When do we need to use to broker clients rather than developing an adapter?” Please correct me if this is not what you meant.

My answer: Creating a custom Broker client should be totally unnecessary in a wM 6.x environment unless you are creating a custom tool for the Broker (which is unlikely). If you are on 6.x, nearly all your new work (except WorkFlow) should be on IS if there is a 6.x solution available. Some resources may still have an ES solution but not a 6.x solution, although I cannot think of one off the top of my head; if this is the case, it may be OK to do some new development on the old ES adapter, but I’d try to minimize it as much as possible. Creating an IS adapter may be a solution if you anticipate a lot of reuse. Going as far as an ADK 6.x adapter is a big investment of time, but provides a very reusable tool in the long run (internal IT shops usually do not want to invest this kind of effort… somewhere in between is usually good enough).

2. Activeworks 3.0 is pretty old now, but you ought to be able to simply upgrade the broker server and have everything still run. I’d defer to others who may have done this for verification… it wouldn’t surprise me if there is some tweaking necessary.

3. It’s hard to say whether creating your own custom IS adapter is worth the effort out of context, but here is some generic advice:

   • If the current custom solution was built with the ADK, you may that it is not too difficult to upgrade it to an ADK 6.x solution that lives on the the IS. Your display logic and resource connection logic are largely the same. However, any logic built by EI on your custom adapter (scripts) would need to be redone in Developer using Flow.
   • If the current solution was built using the broker client API, you may find this more difficult to port. On the other hand, it should still work with the 6.x Broker, and therefore may not need to be changed at all. IS can work with the old documents via the Broker.

– Ted

In principal, I agree with Ted’s verdict. However, we don’t have your requirements to use as a basis for our opinion.

There’s plenty of information available on the Avantage web site if you have access relating to what can be migrated upward and how to do it.

You will be far happier if you migrate/upgrade your implementation to the 6.x architecture. The management and interfaces alone make it worth spending the money.

Just my opinion,

Ray

Thanks guys for your suggestion. I will go through some more documentation and try to figure out solution.

Thanks
Rawn

Rawn,

You asked

The short answer is “yes”. You can migrate your older java broker clients or custom adapters to Integration Server. You would migrate the java business logic to IS java services or combinations of java and Flow services. These services would be invoked using a trigger that subscribes to one or more publishable document types (also know as BrokerEvents in the Broker API).

There is an Upgrade Tool that can help you with many of the tasks associated with migrating older webMethods Enterprise integrations. If you use the tool for nothing else, it will give you a quick way to migrate your events to IS publishable document types and generate a package structure that might work for your project.

See the Upgrade Tool documentation on Advantage for additional details.

HTH,

Mark