Introduction to JCA

Different proprietary integration products cater to specific niches in the market. These products are created to solve existing problems in the industry. Although these products start out with the goal of solving an integration problem, they generally run the danger of being overwhelmed by the fast-paced evolution of the IT industry after some time has passed.

The goal of JCA is to create a layer of abstraction between Java programs and the Enterprise Information Systems (EISs) to hide the messy implementation details of communication between the two systems. An organization's developers no longer need to bother with vendor-specific, system-level drivers to create their own communication architecture. The JCA puts the task of connectivity into the hands of the people who understand the EIS the most the companies that built them.

Think of the relationship between JCA and an EIS as similar to the one between JDBC and an RDBMS. One of the goals of the JCA architecture is to create a consistent and easy-to-understand Java interface that standardizes access to any EIS on the market. The net effect is an extremely reduced learning curve for Java developers dealing with integration issues of different types of EIS.

The other major driving factor in the design of JCA is the leveraging of the proven J2EE platform for enterprise solutions. The success of J2EE can largely be attributed to stable and robust application servers like WebLogic Server, which provides most of the complex infrastructure for large-scale transactional information systems.

WebLogic's Support for JCA

WebLogic Server 7.0 is fully compliant with the J2EE 1.3 specification. JCA 1.0 is part of the J2EE 1.3 specification. Hence, WebLogic Server 7.0 supports applications that use JCA. As a part of its support for JCA, the WebLogic Server implements the Service Provider Interface (SPI) part of the JCA specification, thus enabling seamless "plug-and-play" with JCA-compliant Resource Adapters (RAs) provided by vendors of different EIS systems. Figure 21.1 shows how JCA fits in with the different WebLogic Server technology components.

Figure 21.1. WebLogic Server and the J2EE Connector Architecture.

graphics/21fig01.gif

With the support for the JCA specification, developers using WebLogic Server do not need to tie their applications to any proprietary integration solutions for accessing data from EIS systems. Now you can develop and deploy enterprise applications on WebLogic Server and use the RAs compliant with JCA from different vendors of EIS systems.

Following is a step-by-step look at the different parts of the J2EE Connector Architecture.



Sams Teach Yourself BEA WebLogic Server 7. 0 in 21 Days
Sams Teach Yourself BEA WebLogic Server 7.0 in 21 Days
ISBN: 0672324334
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 339

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